Business Blogging Pros

Quality Equipment & Spray

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Andrew Greese and Quality Equipment & Spray as our newest client.

Quality Equipment & Spray manufactures custom commercial spray rigs. Andy showed me some of the simple yet innovative features of one of his rigs - like a shutoff valve that allows you to change the filter without draining the tank.

Andrew's blog will enable him to educate and inform on some of the things to consider when selecting a spray rig. Andrew lives and breaths this stuff, and I know from talking to him that he is going to have an informative and very educational blog.

I've already subscribed to his feed and look forward to Andrew's postings.

Rochelle Kosanovich

Rochelle Kosanivich, Sales Trainer and Sales Manager for J. Roberts & Company won the raffle during my recent Real Estate Blogging Seminar. The prize was a TypePad blog for a year.

We were going to set up her blog during the seminar, but that is the evening that Typepad (and a large part of San Francisco) suffered a power outage. So we regrouped and met a couple of days ago at the local Paradise Bakery, enjoyed a strawbery Italian ice, and set up her blog.

Well, she jumped right in. It has only been a couple of days and she's already got seven blog posts.

Great job, Rochelle

Your Guide To Green

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Greg Peterson and Amy Godfrey and the rest of the gang at Your Guide To Green as our newest client.

I first met Greg and Amy from Kathleen Davidson, a writer for the Phoenix Business Journal. Kathleen introduced me to Greg and Amy and together they described their mission and project.

I help Greg put together five blogs, each related to a different aspect of sustainability. Greg's blog, Down on the Urban Farm, for example, is where Greg talks about turning the city lot his house sits on into a constant source of fruits and vegetables. Instead of flowers and shrubs growing in the planters and flowerbeds, Greg has fruits and vegetables. His hedge is a row of apple trees.

I provide ongoing coaching to Greg and the other bloggers (Valerie, Maura, John, and Mary).

In addition, I also man the driftnets for them, regularly monitoring about 180 RSS feeds looking for other bloggers to engage in conversation with as well as looking for interesting news items for them to comment and write about. This service has worked out so well that I have begun to offer it to my other clients.

There will be a sixth blog soon, but I can't talk about it yet. Watch this space.

Achieve Transitions

Business Blogging Pros welcomes Business Achive, LLC and Achieve Transitions, LLC as our newest client. I've know the founder, Susan Chesnut for a couple of years, and she is all about helping people and companies who are at transition points and need assistance in career direction, self–management, family communications, etc.

Susan started Achieve Transitions to help people who are in some sort of transition and need help figuring out the next step to take in life. She is a strong proponent of the Birkman Method and the About-U Report.

Susan gave a powerful presentation at a meeting of the Phoenix chapter of Institure of Management Consultants a few months ago and was really impressed. I look forward to reading her blog, Achieve Transitions.

Great Example of Boosting Your Exposure

The Blog Squad over at Build a Better Blog have a great article today about a San Francisco Chiropractor whose blog is his number one source of new patients.

When someone is looking for a product or servicess they have lots of choices. The challenge is to convince them to pick you. They way to do that is to use your blog to educate and inform. Use it to share your knowledge and expertise. If you blog this way, your potential customers will see you as far more credible that your non-blogging competitors.

Sometimes I run into people who say, "If I blog to educate and inform, then I'm giving my expertise away for free and no one will hire me." Nothing could be further from the truth. You have far more knowledge, experience, and judgement than you'll ever be able to put into a blog. Your blog merely gives them a glimpse of what you can do for them.

The Future of the Web

A couple of Days ago, Steve Groves posted a good article about the Internet coming of age and some of Marc Andreessen's thoughts.

I've spent a few days thinking about this, and my personal opinion is that the Internet has not yet come of age, and there are some pieces missing that need to be in place in order for that to happen. I think that an internet that has 'come of age' will have three elements:

1. Topic Centric Communities
Yes, I know we have these. In fact we had them long before the World Wide Web existed. They were called Usenet Groups. In fact, back in the early days o accessing the internet (does anyone else remember Shell Accounts?) I switched ISPs so I could gain access to alt.security.pgp. My definition of a community is a number of individuals who have come together around a specific topic, and that number of individuals must be small enough for trust relationships to be maintains between most members of the community.

A person can probably maintain a few dozen trust relationships, but certainly not a few thousand. That is why I think there will be dozens/hundreds/thousands of nearly identical communities all cenetered around the same topic.

It is interesting that Marc Andreessen's new venture Ning allows anyone to set up an online community. I believe there is a hazard to that: The whole world could easily devolve into each of us having our own 'community' of which the owner is the only member. I saw a lot of that happen in Ham radio in the seventies and eighties: It became so easy to put up a 2-meter repeater that we ended up with repeaters on the air handling almost zero traffic simply due to the fact that anyone with an ego and a checkbook could say he had his own repeater. Will we devolve to the point where anyone with an ego can say he/she runs an online community? I don't know. I do know that the only thing that saved VHF Ham radio was the limited availability of RF spectrum. There is no such equivalent limitation on the Internet today.

2. Topic 'Latest News' feeds
Even though I may be a member of an online community focused on widgets, it would be nice to know what is going on in the world that is related to widgets. Right now this is a difficult, time-consuming problem. It takes a lot of effort and energy to stay abreast of all the happenings on any topic. I think some sort of new social media search and filtering entity is needed. Technorati does a good job, but it's far rfom perfect. Maybe the anser is something like Yahoo! Pipes or some sort of Squidoo 'meta lens'.

3. Generalized Search
Yea, we have Google. But IMHO search in general, and Google specifically, is broken. It is WAY too difficult to find relevant content and Google changes their algorithm too much to make the results of a search repeatable. (How many times have you searched Google, found something of interest, and then run that same search a few days later only to have the item of interest be nowhere to be found?) Again, I think Technorati does a decent job here, but what I want is something that will aggregate and collate all the results, eliminate the crap, and just give me the relevant information. (I'm finding that I use Wikipedia a lot more than Google these days when I'm trying to get up to speed on a new subject. Perhaps there is a message there.)

A long time ago, (when dinosaurs roamed the earth, in fact) I envisioned a briefcase-sized device with a keyboard and screen that contained or was connected to a giant database holding every bit of knowledge in the known world. The Library at Alexandria with a handle, so to speak. You could type in a plain-lannguage question and it would return the answer in plain language.

I think we are there from a data perspective but we are a long way from being there for the plain-language part.

Seminar: Blogging For Real Estate Professionals

Greg Gotcher of Go Crazy Marketing and I have decided to put on a blogging seminar for realtors.

More and more, I'm finding realtors are looking for an edge in today's tough real estate market. Some have alerady turned to blogging and have enjoyed great success. If you are one of those, great (In fact send me an email, I'd like to hear your story first-hand).

If you are a Phoenix-area realtor thinking about blogging, or even wondering if it will work for you, then come to this seminar. It's free. Yup, that's right. Free, like in 'No Charge'. (I can't say that these seminars will always be free, but this first one is.)

And because I think it is important, I have also asked Steven Groves to come and spend a few minutes talking about Agent2.0

Click here to learn more

Blogging for Sellers' Agents

It's not your father's real estate market any more. It's not even 2005 any more. In 2005, anyone who could fog a mirror could make a living as a realtor in Phoenix. I have a friend who sold his house a couple of years ago and he received multiple offers even before the sign went up. Today the average time on the market for homes like mine in my neighborhood is 90 days. Within the square mile I live in, there are a dozen homes for sale.

Like any other blogger, a realtor should use her blog to build trust and credibility. People don't do business with your company, they do business with you. Write your blog so that people will connect with you and come to trust you.

That's all well and good, but you often hear me say "Trust comes from demonstrated performance." It doesn't matter how nice your client thinks you are if you don't sell his house. You need to be using every tool at your disposal to promote your client's house as widely as possible. A house-specific blog can do just that.

As an example, I recently put my home on the market. For $4.95 per month, I created a Typepad blog about my house. Once a day I update it, adding a picture or some text. (I don't have to actually sit down and do this every day. I could for example, sit down once a week and create seven posts, each scheduled to be published on a different day.) Within 3 days, that blog about my house was on the first page of Google and has remained there ever since, sometimes in the very first position. (And yes, I've had a few hundred visitors to that blog)

One of the great features of a Typepad blog is that Google is notified the instant you create a new post: No waiting for weeks until the Google spyder gets around to you. That's why you can have such a dramatic affect upon your search engine rankings in such a short time.

A house-specific blog is a great way to get good ad copy in front of potential buyers too. I know that each and every one of you wants to say more about your clients' house that you can fit in that MLS listing. A blog is one answer. There is no limit to the number of words or photos (or video, for that matter). For example, accompanying the photo of my garden, I talked about the sweetness of the cantelope and the freshness of the snap-peas. Any potential buyer trapped in an apartment and harboring a secret desire for a garden is going to say, "Oh Yeah!".

Of course, doing this for your clients probably means you are going to have to polish your copywriting skills. You are probably really good at cramming the right words into that MLS listing. With a blog, you have a chance to stretch, tell a story, and really draw your potential buyers in. I'll talk more about that in another post.

Some of you are saying, The average agent doesn't have time to be keeping up a blog for each of his listings! Yup, you are absolutely right. And that's why the average agen will remain average. In a tough market like we are in now, agents who are only average won't survive.

But what about Buyer's Agents? If you act primarily as the buyer's agent, then you have a whole different set of considerations. And that will be the topic of my sext post.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes may solve a problem I have been complaining about a lot lately.

When I do Reputation Monitoring or erecting a Driftnet, I basically create several RSS feeds of searches. Let's say that I want to monitor references to my name, Dave Barnhart. I'll set up a Google Blog Search and a Google News Search on "Dave Barnhart". But because Google doesn't catch everything, I'll also use Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and other blog search tools.

While that better insures that I don't miss anything, it also means that I have to wade through a lot of duplicates. I've often said, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could run all these RSS Feeds through some sort of filter that would remove the dupes?".

Enter Yahoo! Pipes. I haven't given it a rigorous test but I've played with it a little and the interface is so intuitive that I didn't even have to read the documentation to figure out how to build a pipe to do just what I was looking for.

You simply drag tools or modules from the left sidebar, configure them, and then drag a connector between them. Cool and easy.

I'll experiment with it more over the next few days and let you know how it is working out. I bet that Pipes will become a regular part of my toolset.

Open vs Unmoderated Comments

Steve Groves asked today about the reasoning behind my practice of moderating comments. He follows Scoble's practice of leaving comments open and unmoderated. I've not left a comment on Scobleizer but I presume Bob also uses CAPTCHA (that tool that displays a graphic containing a few charatcers and requires you to enter them).

In contrast, when I set up a blog for a client, I turn off CAPTCHA and authentication but turn on moderation (comments must be approved by the blog owner before they are published. Here is my reasoning:

1. Make it as easy as possible for people to leave comments.
2. Make sure that negative, derogatory, or inappropriate comments never get published.
3. Make sure comments are read by the blog owner in a timely manner.

One big reason for our blogs is to solicit feedback. We want that feedback. If someone is going to take the time and energy to respond to my blog and provide me with a pearl of wisdom, I want to make sure that there are as few barriers as possible. To me, authentication and CAPTCHA are barriers. By using them, we are making legitimate commenters jump through hoops. CAPTCHA sends the wrong message: "Blogger to Commenter: My convenience is more important than yours."

We do however, want to make sure that comments are approriate. If someone is going to leave a comment saying mean things about my wife - as has happened to Miriam Scoble - I don't want that post to ever be published. I accomplish that by moderating comments.

To accomplish the third goal, I configure the blog so the owner is notified of each comment. Otherwise, if someone leaves a comment to a post I wrote months ago, I might not notice. On top of that, most business owners have their hands full just running their businesses. They are likely to be too busy to periodically check for comments if they have to do it themselves. Email notification is a great way to make sure that comments get read.

I'm not saying that Bob Scoble does it the wrong way. Bob Scoble has a different problem: He gets hundreds (thousands?) of comments and it is just not humanly possible for him to review and approve each one. CAPTCHA allows him to filter out the SPAM. It does not, however, prevent inapropriate comments from being published, but Bob knows that and it's something he is willing to accept.

My Low Technorati Rankings

The other day in a offline conversation, Steve Groves was harassing me about my low Technorati rankings. Pure and simple, it is a case of 'the cobbler's kids have no shoes'. I firmly believe that in order to have a successful blog, you must:

1. Find other blogs speaking to the same audience as yours.
2. Read those blogs on a regular basis, preferable once a week.
3. Leave comments on those blogs.
Write on your own blog about topics found on other blogs and link/trackback to those posts.
4. In addition, systematically scan the blogosphere for mentions of you, your company, your URLs, trademarks, etc.

What Steve didn't realize is that I do that regularly, but I'm doing that very thing for some of my clients. Some people just don't have time to scan the blogosphere like they should. For example, I have a client with multiple blogs on disparate subjects and a dozen or so URLs. Even with an RSS reader, it takes about five hours a week to keep up with all of that and he just doesn't have the five hours. I act as a driftnet, monitoring about 180 blogs and google searches, and send him an email once or twice a week containing one or two dozen blog posts. From those, he picks a smaller number that he finds compelling and leaves comments. It saves him a ton of legwork. To him, it is worth it to have me do the legwork for him.

I, some cases, I also do this for other smaller clients as part of the ongoing blog coaching I offer even though it involves only about an hour a week. The reason is simple. I find that it takes most business owners 3-6 months to to really get into the groove of blogging. Regular presonal coaching during this period of time helps jump start them and get the good habits engrained. So part of my coaching is hand-holding: directing their attention to good opportunities to leave comments, help them stay engaged in the blogospher's conversations, etc.

Yea, I really need to start carving out some time for myself, but helping my clients be successful bloggers is important too.