Business blogs, podcasts, and RSS are poised to dominate Internet communication for the next half decade or longer. The evidence shows clearly why. It’s because of what a business owner recently in one of our Marketing With Busines Blogs sessions called “the business blogging pardox.” Blogs are not complicated, yet they can accomplish so much for small business owners and professionals.

No magic wand here, and no hype!

Blogs are not the magic wand that many tech gurus and blogging pros tout. But business blogs are an undeniable part of a master marketing formula. And it’s a formula you need to blend yourself if you’re going to master the marketplace of the new millennium.

Whether you realize it or not, elements of blogging are cropping up in nearly every area of marketing, media, and general communication. And the most important reason is because of one key element (what blogs are based on,) — RSS (Real Simple Syndication.)

The solution that binds the marketing formula together

RSS is at the core of podcasts, instant digital distribution, and on-demand media.

• You can use it covertly to monitor your niche, industry, or competitors.
• Use it to stay up to speed filtering an incredible amount of info in a radically shortened timeframe.
• Or out in the open, you can put this core power source of business blogging to work in your marketing, positioning, and promotion.

RSS is something that will exponentially multiply all your online marketing strategies, and many of your offline ones as well. Simplicity is the key.

That’s the beauty of business blogs. You don’t have a lot of moving parts, and what you do have is easy to manage. But the best part is the viral (search engine based and human) multiplication of your efforts.

How digital positioning makes a real world difference

Business blogs, podcasts, and RSS all work together to allow for rapid assimilation and leadership in niche areas of the marketplace. Take Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba for example. These trainers and first time authors took their first book, Creating Customer Evangelists, to levels of national recognition so quickly that they seemed to come from nowhere.

How did this pair of trainers position themselves as first time authors to be crowned the national “go to experts” in their niche by the New York Times and Harvard Business School? (more…)

PART 2 –Five simple (and nearly free) ways you can start monitoring your RSS feeds to maximize your marketing with business blogs

In PART 1 of “How To Measure The Impact of Your Marketing With Business Blogs and RSS” we looked at why it’s so important for you to make business blogging and RSS feeds a major part of your online marketing (if you want to be in a key position when consumers want to buy that is.)

And — although it will take some effort on your part to make marketing with business blogs, podcasts, and RSS work for you and your company — I think you can see from just the few statistics we looked at in PART 1 that it is well worth it. But really … to be brutally honest (and being anything but that wouldn’t be fair to you) — you don’t have any choice.

So here are five quick ways you can start monitoring the impact of your marketing with business blogs and RSS feeds so you can test your approaches, track consumer actions, and improve your results.

Here are five simple your business blog and RSS marketing results can be analyzed:

1. Track new feed subscribers

You must continually increase your subscriber base if you want to increase traffic. It’s a simple relationship.

If you have a self-hosted business blog like WordPress, then a service like FeedBurner can help track the number of subscribers to your business blog. Some of the better third-party hosted blog services like Blog Harbor offer internal tracking of RSS feed traffic. There are some other options out there as well if you don’t want to give up your URL in your feed as you do with FeedBurner, or host your blog with a provider like Blog Harbor.

No matter what option you choose, implementing some type of RSS subscriber tracking will be helpful. That way the baseline data you gather can be added into the mix when monitoring your business blog and RSS marketing.

2. Develop free “premium” content for readers to download or subscribe to, and track those click-throughs or subscriptions.

This is one of the most effective methods for maximizing your marketing with business blogs. Just like you’d do on a regular web site, you need to create highly targeted reports, ebooks, or newsletters/ezines that directly compliment the niche focus of your blog.

Yes – I did say newsletter. Although a recent study by Pew Research showed that 25% of all web surfers are bypassing web sites all together, they’re still looking for targeted information/education about and around their interests. If you’ve already established credibility with your blog content and have proven you can add to their growth with an email based publication – then it’s a pretty good bet they’ll register for it.

Another consideration is that you’ve still got 75% of the market catching up with the technology. These are people who are still accustomed to the standard email delivery of content. This strategy makes sure you capture them as well.

A free report or ebook would work just as well. But don’t mislead or offer junk just to get a read on the quality of your traffic. That’ll certainly tick people of and have them dropping both your feed and your email delivered content.

Business Coaching Corner: This is not the place to try out some new download or ezine format. You need a solid benchmark and a proven track record to compare your on-blog downloads against. Use a free publication, download, or report that’s proven itself online or offline in another marketing channel.

The quality of your initial “free premium” content will firmly position you in the minds of your target audience. Whatever free content you offer is leaving a first impression with subscribers that will not be easily changed.

3. Monitor click-throughs from posts and feeds

Although you can’t track specific people, you can tell which content or product offerings drive usage. And the way you do that is with tracking links that lead people out of your feeds and posts. If you’re using a halfway decent web analytics software program (something like ProAnalyzer or DynaTracker,) this will be a snap for you.

Given that RSS is an additional way to reach customers, you should consider testing the cost efficiency of different ways to get customers to subscribe to your feeds or free premium content offers.

4. Measure the time spent on the target site with visitors originating from your posts or RSS feeds.

Any top line traffic analysis software will allow you to track visitor footprints and movements around the destination site readers link to out of your business blog. This information will help you assess when people view, how long, and where they go on your site. It’ll help you determine what type of content to publish, and how many pieces to publish at a time And this data can even help you determine what time of day to publish.

If you have an e-commerce site, track purchases and related metrics. And look at how you can engage these customers and extend your relationship beyond the steps you’ve taken (like step #2 above) once they reach your site.

5. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple) — Minimize your costs and start out slow

When you’re going to get started monitoring and measuring your business blogging and RSS marketing efforts, don’t make this a big ordeal. It doesn’t need to be. Most of the time all that’s needed is the re-titling of pages or encoding URLs, not creating special HTML or landing pages. This keeps the costs of monitoring the marketing impact of your business blogging and RSS feeds painless on the pocketbook.

Remember — the key to getting consumers to keep revisiting your business blog and reading your RSS feeds is that you must continually supply new content that readers find relative and valuable. Though RSS currently reaches a relatively small user base, it’s growing fast. And RSS feeds (and your business blog posts) have a direct impact the search engine positioning of your main site when it’s set up properly, so RSS reaches it’s marketing impact far outside the blogosphere.

Starting to use and measure business blog and RSS marketing today can be an important addition to your marketing mix. It reaches consumers who might not otherwise engage with your content, and when set up properly — draws them in as prospects and then clients.

In today’s internet dependent marketplace, every company with a properly structured business blog and a robust Web site is a content provider. Start thinking about and testing how to make business blog and RSS marketing work for you.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Previous in series

PART 1 –Why does marketing with business blogs and RSS deserve your attention?

If you’re a business owner who’s marketing with business blogs, you’ve probably realized that automated options for measuring the marketing effectiveness of RSS feeds are slim to none. Compared to static web sites tracking, traffic analysis, and metrics related to RSS is still in it’s infancy. There’s not much help out there in the form of software or ASP solutions (unless you’ve got deep pockets and an internal marketing research team.)

The good news

If you’re a business owner who’s serious about optimizing your online marketing with business blogs (and it’s underlying RSS feeds,) there are some simple steps you can take . Although it may take a little more effort gathering measurements on your “live content” (RSS-based) than tracking and metrics on your regular static web site — you can get the measurements you need to tweak your business blog and maximize your RSS marketing results.

In PART 2 of this article, we’ll share five methods that have proven effective with tracking our own business blogs as well as helping dozens of our coaching clients who’ve completed the Marketing With Business Blogs course and are aggressive about getting results.

But before we get to those steps, I’d be remiss if I didn’t coach you on a few important points regarding the importance of RSS, business blogs, and other live content. Like any other area of business, having the right mindset and motivation will have a lot to do with your level of success. So let’s take a moment and look at the reasons why you must give RSS the attention it deserves — IF you’re going to market effectively in today’s online marketplace.

Why RSS deserves your attention

It’s a common excuse I hear from the business owners we coach when it comes to making the effort to gather metrics on their business blogs.

“I don’t know who is subscribing to my feed, and I can’t tell how many people are actually reading a new post. So why put in the extra effort to gather metrics right now.”

Although you can’t tell who has actually read your RSS feeds (as you can with e-mail,) they’re still a crucial part of marketing in today’s online environment. Today you can’t predict how consumers are going to gather information. They can find you, your products, or your services in dozens of different ways online. Organic search engine results are one of the top ways.

And one thing you can be sure of — the “World Live Web” and all it’s content is getting substantial boosts in weighting for inclusion in top search engine results. If you doubt that fact, just take Yahoo’s recent addition of top-rated “news bloggers” to their search results in their news engine as evidence. Or Google’s investment (a publicly traded company answering to shareholders) in a blog specific search engine.

Search engine placement is essential for small business owners and professionals who want to market effectively online, and it’s growing more critical day by day.

Again, let’s just look at the facts:

- A recent study by Forrester shows that 80% of all Internet users use search engines to find web sites.

- Enquiro discovered in their research that 64% of business users go first to a search engine to research a B2B purchase decision.

- Studies by Outsell reveal that 79% of ALL business research begins with a search engine.

I could keep going on for pages, but you get the point. Looking at these statistics alone it’s pretty clear — you’re either there when your prospects are looking for you, or you’re dead in the water. All recent reliable data points to a major shift in the marketing impact live content is having on search engine positioning.

And even when we look at RSS feeds stand-alone, you can see it’s important to be part of the World Live Web. It’s your chance to be heard as more and more consumers come to rely on the convenience of content delivered via RSS. Some RSS readers, like FeedDemon and NewsGator, allow users to set up custom searches to continually monitor important key words. Those can be things like your company name, the profession or industry you’re in, the type of service you provide, or the products you offer.

Whether it’s in the organic search results of the major search engines, or the personal RSS readers of consumers — wouldn’t you like to be there when the time is right?

Well in PART 2 of this article, we’ll share with you five simple (and nearly free) ways you can start monitoring your RSS feeds to help maximize your marketing with business blogs.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Next in series

RE: “How to Increase Traffic, Build Trust, and Win More Clients with Your Business Blog” ~ Thursday, Sept. 22nd.

If you’re in a hurry, click this link for details and limited FREE registration: Business Blogging TeleClass

Have you started using business blogs, podcasts, and RSS to boost your business growth yet? Everyone is talking about blogging, but very few business owners are taking advantage of it the way it should be utilized for maximum profits.

Maybe you’re still sitting on the sidelines, leery to take the first step because you’re not sure what business blogging can do to enhance your marketing. Or maybe you jumped right in and started blogging for your business, but you haven’t seen any results yet.

Well, Deborah and I have some good news for you.

I can tell you from our own experience, and the results dozens of our clients have gotten — there’s no denying the positive impact that business blogging can have in boosting your traffic and winning more clients.

For example, by using business blogs, we took BusinessOwnersCoachingClub.com from sub-100 ranking in Google to consistent top 10 rankings in just 45-days for our top five keywords! And that’s just one small part of the benefits that come from business blogging.

But (and this is a BIG but)… if your business blogging is not done correctly, you’re going to end up with nothing to show after months of hard work except a lot of wasted time. And if you rely on the books, ebooks, or courses on “blogging basics” available out there — you’re not going to be much better off.

The bottom line is, a ten year old can set up a blog in less than 15-minutes. It’s not the “technical” side of blogging that makes the difference between success and failure. It’s the mindset you start out with and the strategies you build on that will determine how effective your business blogging, podcasting, and use of RSS is in attracting prospects and gaining new clients.

So Here’s The Good News

In this Thursday’s upcoming 70-minute live Teleclass we’ll lift the veil of confusion and cut through all the hype to reveal the often mis-understood power of business blogging, podcasts, and RSS.

Click this link for details & limited FREE registration: Business Blogging TeleClass

With what you’ll learn in this 70-minute live call you’ll have a huge jump-start on your competitors. And you’ll have a decided advantage over the vast majority of business bloggers struggling to get it right on their own.

Don’t miss out! To register and grab one of the 87 seats remaining, just go to: Business Blogging TeleClass

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Tags: business blogging teleclass, business blogging

In a continuation of our review of three simple strategies for using RSS in your marketing inside and outside of your business blog, here’s strategy #2 and #3 with two more “money making RSS marketing ideas” to go with them. (Part 1 here)

Extend your existing advertising and branding efforts with RSS

Subscribers who regularly review headlines in your business blog are more likely to keep your brand top of mind, even if they’re only perusing those headlines once per week. Remember that intentional branding requires you carefully craft the way your RSS feeds are written.

And when it comes to literal advertising, you can wrap those into an RSS reader or buy advertising on RSS feeds using a service such as Pheedo.

Money making RSS marketing idea#2: Make your marketing and branding engaging. Use a mix of video, audio, and static content — then use links everywhere you can think of to encourage users to view it and interact with you.

Distribute internal team communications, client specific content, and press releases using RSS

When properly systemized RSS feeds allow you to painlessly keep your internal employee team well informed. These type of internal applications of RSS make you money by dropping dollars right to the bottom line. (Always the sweetest type of profit increase, because it’s a cost savings too!)

And when it comes to delivering “premium content” (for a fee) to audiences, you can make sure ONLY people who have paid for the content will recieve it. With recent advancements in “subscriber only” RSS feeds, you can rest assured that both your internal/private content and your premium content will stay that way. You get all the instant delivery benefits of RSS Feeds along with enhanced security.

Money making RSS marketing idea#2: Make sure your premium content RSS feeds are short and informative. This will ensure recipients read them through.

If you have your business blog up and running, make sure you’re fully leveraging the technology to maximize it’s impact on your marketing. Once you’ve discovered the proven methods for unleashing the full marketing power of business blogs, RSS, and podcasting — you’ll see why we so strongly recommend these channels as permenat parts of your overall business marketing strategy.

No matter what stage your business blogging effectiveness is, remember that a written business blogging strategy and regular content schedule is critical for successful implementation.

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — Marketing With Business Blogs.

He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honoulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

When it comes to business blogging and it’s uses for marketing, business owners are just starting to catch on. Here at Advanced Business Blogging we’ve revealed a number of strategies and covered the obvious benefits of business blogging including relationship building with your prospects, increasing the dialog with clients, and the resulting boosts in search engine ranking when your business blogging strategy is properly executed.

But if you just stop there, you’ll be short-changing yourself as most business owners do who blindly jump into blogging. The technology has virtually limitless applications, and RSS feeds (the underlying power of blogs) is where a wealth of marketing benefits lie.

Unless you’ve completed the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media coaching course (or something just as powerful,) you may be unaware of the significant marketing impact RSS feeds themselves can bring to your business. But when you learn to leverage both your business blog and RSS feeds (inside and outside your blogs,) you’ll unleash the true marketing power of business blogs and RSS that most owners simply get hyped up about.

In the next couple of posts I’ll share three simple strategies for using RSS in your marketing, and three money making RSS marketing ideas — just to get you thinking.

For today, here’s strategy #1… (more…)

Protecting the Intellectual Property of Your Small Business

Your business blog and web site content is valuable. You’ve worked hard or paid good money to get it up online, but there are thieves waiting out there to steal your intellectual property. Whether it’s written word, audio (podcast or other,) or even images — you must protect your material from theft and hijacking.

While not every post you create on your business blog may be Copyright worthy, there are some things you must be aware of with even short reference posts. And when it comes to your longer articles — you absolutely MUST make every effort to protect those from being abused.

My partner Deborah and I write and publish at least two articles per week with our syndicated columns and magazine submissions, so keeping an eye out for intellectual property thieves is something our staff is pretty diligent about. But many small business owners are unaware of the potential exposure that comes with creating good content.

Here are just a few things that can happen when your good content gets hijacked by bad people:

(more…)

Well, today was the day a lot of people have been waiting for. Rush Limbaugh has taken Podcasting for profit mainstream. If you’re looking to succeed in business in the 21st Century marketplace, it doesn’t matter what your politics are. This is an exciting advancement because it’s an effort that’s getting functional Podcasting out to an educated, high-income demographic — and it’s being done for profit!

In one fell swoop 22 million listeners were exposed to a detailed explanation of Podcasting, and roughly half a million paid subscribers got to download the inaugural Podcast of the daily Rush Limbaugh show to their chosen MP3 player. I happen to be one of those subscribers, so in the always present spirit of my business coaching thought process — here’s what you can learn from this mega-size Podcasting for profit effort.

What YOU can learn from a REAL Podcasting for profit model

I’m going to give you a quick overview of how Rush’s Podcast system currently works, along with some business coaching insight as to what you should model in any similar Podcast effort (or any paid content delivery via RSS for that matter.)

The first step is to download a desktop management program which ensures only paid subscribers can access the RSS feed.

Downloading, installing, and configuring the super compact desktop program is a breeze. I had it done in 60-seconds. So even though it’s a separate program, it’s very consumer friendly. That’s an important attribute that some other “for fee” RSS programs out there are still lacking, and one important attribute you need to make sure is part of any Podcasting for profit effort you undertake for your business. (more…)

I read an interesting article the other day by Pamela Parker over at the ClickZ Network. She interviewed Dick Costolo CEO of Feedburner who shared some interesting research on emerging trends in RSS advertising that have a direct impact on business bloggers. Whether you business blog to build relationships and trust with your target market, or you business blog to monetize through targeted contextual advertising, there are some valuable insights and trends that you should be aware of.

Out of the brief summary of findings that Dick shared with Pamela, there are several developing trends that will significantly impact your business blogging effectiveness no matter how you monetize your business blog. I’d like to I’d like to call your attention to three here.

Three developing trends that will significantly impact your business blogging effectiveness

1. Readers (and advertisers) want relevancy — so give it to them with a mix of longer posts mixed in with shorter ones

One of the challenges that advertising via RSS based on contextual targeting is that many bloggers predominantly publish short posts. With shorter posts there’s often not enough content to accurately align ads with content. Dick is saying that publisher feedback has revealed “people are paying much closer attention to the relevance of this particular ad to this specific post.”

Whether you’re looking for higher relevancy for ads you place on your blog, or looking to have people actually “stick” once they hit your business blog — the message is the same.

Be sure to mix longer/article-type posts with shorter “drive-by” posts.

When you do, you’ll not only get higher relevancy from contextual ads (including Google Ad Sense,) and enhanced stickiness for your target market. You’ll also get (more…)

Attention small business owners: Learn How to Harness the Number One Business Technology of 2005 and Put the Power of the World’s Most Effective Marketing Method to Work for You …

How To Master Business Blogging to Increase Traffic, Build Trust and Win More Clients With Your Own Business Blog

In just 37-days you’ll go from “blogging newbie” to “business blogging professional”.

During this five-week business blogging telecourse designed specifically for busy business owners you’ll get 10+ hours of interactive coaching, over 2 hours of easy to follow “how-to” videos, and two practical planning manuals. We’ll take you by the hand, and guide you step-by-step through a simple system that will help you unravel the world of blogging and put you on the fast track to online communication success.

• By the end of week one you’ll have not only one, but two business blogs up and running. And you’ll learn exactly why this second blog is critical for rapid search engine ranking.

  (With what you’ll learn in week one alone you’ll save enough money to pay for your entire course plus put another $100 in your pocket! And that’s with just one business blog!)

• By the end of week two, you’ll know the secrets of generating content that both human visitors and search engine spiders will slurp up like a thirsty dog on a hot summer day.
• During week three and four we’ll show you exactly how to start channeling an ever-increasing stream of highly targeted prospects to your site where you’ll educate and build rapport while positioning yourself as a trusted adviser.
• At the end of week five you’ll be fully equipped to begin converting content to cash as you transform your business blog into a major marketing arm of your business.

Don’t get crushed by the waves of change! Instead, grab your surfboard, and get ready to ride this wave of high touch interactive communication to attract, keep, and grow more clients.

With this business blogging TeleCourse specially designed for busy business owners, you’ll get the practical action steps you need to succeed with your business blog, dozens of immediate applications inside and outside your business, and most importantly — the coaching and motivation to put what you learn into action!

Through this exclusive series of …

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… you’ll be competent, confident, and ready to profit from the technology that Fortune magazine has called “the no. 1 business technology trend for 2005.”

Get the full story and all the guaranteed business boosting benefits waiting for you at the How To Master Business Blogging summary site.