I’ve got to tell ya… as a busy business owner, a lot of bloggers have been getting on my nerves lately. Especially those who blog about the business side of blogging.

When it comes to self-importance and mis-information many of these self-appointed ‘experts’ rank right up there with the opines and opinions of the Ancient (mainstream) Media.

Debbie Weil is NOT one of those people. But some of the comments associated with one of her recent posts on the readership of blogs were the final straws that broke the camels back and pushed me off the virtual plantation in defense of my true business owner brethren.

What is a blog to a business owner anyway?

It sure as heck isn’t what full-time “professional” bloggers say it is. That’s a totally different world. A parallel universe of reality that is much more closely tied to journalism (and a job) than to business ownership.

If you’re a busy business owner, then all that a blog is to you — is a tool. A tool to get:

• Targeted traffic

• To build a qualified prospect list

• And to make more sales!

As a busy business owner running one off-line business and one click-and-mortar business, and after starting and selling three other businesses — I take offense at what many of these experts espouse as “rules” for successfully using blogs in business. Not so much for me, but how misleading that advice is for other business owners new to blogging.

I frankly don’t care how many people are subscribed to the RSS feeds on our business blogs. And I’m not all that concerned with how many people are commenting on our business blogs either. (The vast majority of people who comment are other bloggers, a limited audience.)

What I am concerned with is the positioning of our business blogs in search engines for our top keywords.

I’m concerned with prospects finding one of our products or services when they go to a search engine (any search engine) and try to find solutions to their problems.

Providing solutions to people who are looking for answers, when they are looking for those answers is what business owners are (or should be) concerned with. NOT posting on some schedule annointed with holy oil by ‘they-that-are-the-blogosphere.’

Business owners are busy, so what matters most to us is the bottom line!

Here’s what I mean… (more…)

If you’re business blogging and are dealing with a significant amount of comment spam, here’s some great info for you — especially if you’re business blogging with WordPress.

We’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks putting the finishing touches on the home study version of the Marketing With Business Blogs. And that project, along with questions coming in from students of the multimedia coaching course, has had me doing a lot of research. One of the things I’ve been doing is scouring the net for WordPress plugins that’ll help business bloggers with their marketing and administrative efficiency.

A little over a month ago I decided to start testing various solutions to stopping comment span. I was pretty frustrated with this problem myself (although my assistant was the one who was doing the actual ‘house cleaning.’ :)) But when students of the blogging course started to pepper us with questions on how to stop this problem I realized how this administrative problem could really get in a way of busy business owners who want to market efficiently with business blogs. (Remember that comment spam is not only ugly… it also saps away valuable points in your search engine rankings.)

Since we were dealing with a ton of comment span here at Advanced Business Blogging and on our other business blogs, I figured we could provide the Guinea pigs for testing. So over the last 40-days or so we’ve tried five different anti-comment spam solutions on five separate business blogs, and here are the results.

Five anti-comment spam solutions — with one BIG winner!

Unfortunately there are a lot of supposed “solutions” out there that spammers simply laugh at. To save you time and frustration I’m going to share with you what we found. Let’s take a quick look at the solutions we tested starting with the least efficient and working our way down to the hands-down winner. (more…)