Here’s another reason you’ll want to add to the list of why insightful business owners should learn advanced business blogging strategies — mainstream press coverage.

After barely completing the “Marketing With Business Blogs” multi-media coaching course, and within just three weeks of completing two new blogs, one of our clients was profiled in Hawaii’s #1 weekly business publication Pacific Business News (and we got interviewed as well. :))

The business without blogging

Vanessa Beaton has a thriving retail store in downtown Honolulu, but she’s always had a challenge with the staggered work schedules of the “Off The Mat” team. Because of the mix of full-timers and part-timers it’s been difficult for her to consistently communicate with her team so everyone is on the same page.

When the staff of the Off The Mat yoga store needed to communicate with each other in the past, they often would use a simple tool: Post-it notes stuck to the computer terminal near the cash register.

Now they use something decidedly cooler, and infinitely more effective: (more…)

Have you been waiting to start a business blog because you’re skeptical of how a blog can help grow your business in a tangible way? If so, you’re not alone. It’s something I commonly hear from our coaching clients, especially those who have what they term a “real physical product.”

If that’s you, (or even if you have a service type business,) I’ve got good news for you! It’s some help in the form of a case study of a successful product-based business blog.

With the help of this business blog case study you’ll see how creating your own business blog can give a serious boost to your marketing, public relations, and media mentions – no matter what your product or service is.

In today’s case study we’re going to look at a business blog by Maytag. Yes, that’s right -Maytag. You know … the company with great washing machines and those under-worked repairmen who play tricks on each other in TV ads.

Well, now their development team for a new “men’s fridge” called the Skybox™ are blogging up a storm over at http://www.ka-thunk.com/.

It’s funny, informative, and it’s allowing enthusiastic sports fans to join in and do the selling for Maytag! Best of all — it’s creating a big-time buzz about this new product with a fraction of the cold hard cash that it would take with “old school” advertising.

(more…)

Blogs in general, and business blogs in particular got another credibility boost today. Ask Jeeves finally admitted that rumors of a purchase of the heavy hitting aggregator Bloglines were valid today. The search player “Ask Jeeves” continued it’s systematic acquisition of high leverage growth resources with the recent purchase.

What’s significant here is that all acquisitions made in the last year by Ask Jeeves (well over $500 million) have been made in properties that will significantly boost volume to it’s search engine and provide new mediums for advertising distribution. Bloglines is another purchase that fits right in with this plan.

“Ask Jeeves is, in the main, about information retrieval,” said Daniel Read, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves in a recent article. “What we see in Bloglines is another angle at looking at information retrieval. You could almost call it persistent searching. It enables you to persistently search for the type of information you’re interested in.”

Obviously blogs fit right into Ask Jeeves acquisition and high-leverage growth focus. With thousands of words of new niche specific content being added every minute in the form of blogs, the amount and quality of information is constantly growing. Ask Jeeves recognizes the direction that the internet is moving just as Google did when it purchased Blogger.com. The net is becoming increasingly personalized and niche-specific, and the companies that recognize that will be the leaders in the dynamic interactive environment of the new internet.

It’s not just about words and ideas — profit counts too!

The first integration project for Ask Jeeves will apparently be integrating the Bloglines team with Ask Jeeves’ Teoma search group to boost the search engine’s effectiveness. But if past comments by Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher (who’ll be joining Ask Jeeves as VP,) are any indication of the direction the blogosphere is moving then content-related integrated advertising is not far off either.

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, there is not yet a viable business model for profiting with RSS feeds. But targeted ads directly related to the content of blogs is inevitable. It will likely be the next evolutionary step in the maturation of the blogosphere into a more viable business growth channel.

Regardless of what your peers may or may not be saying about business blogging, the internet is being incrementally transformed day after day with blogs. If that were not true you would not see powerhouse players like Microsoft, Google, and Ask Jeeves pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the blogging arena. It’s the interactive connection that people have been longing for, and the “word of mouth” leverage that business owners have been longing for.

As a small business owners you have plenty of hard facts and market moves by “big dollar” players that indicate the way the 21st Century marketplace is moving. You need to either get off the beach and start surfing the wave of change now by starting your own business blog. Or you sit on the sand watching your competition have all the fun and gain more and more mind share. Don’t be fooled into a “wait and see” attitude. There is no in-between!

To learn how you can go from “blogging newbie” to business blogging master, check out the five week interactive coaching course How to Master Business Blogging.