If you’re a business owner looking to market with blogs, podcasts, and RSS — then here’s another cool tool to help your efforts to get more exposure. It’s called a Swicki! A Swicki is a new and very different kind of search engine created by Eurekster. It allows you to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about.

It’s a great tool for business bloggers because unlike other search engines, a Swicki puts you and your community in total control over the results.
It’s an ingenious social tool too that uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results.

In doing some last minute research for our presentation at the Publishing4Profits Seminar this weekend I came across a terrific book publishing blog by Joe Wikert. After giving Joe’s Swicki a spin, I liked what I saw and followed his lead quickly creating our business blogging Swicki.

Three simple customization steps and about five minutes of adding the simple code to your site and you’re up and running. You can check out the Advanced Business Blogging Swicki over to the left under the “Search Tools” header (about half way down the page.)

Testing the Swicki Search Engine

If you’re like me you probably find a lot of good relevant material buried way down deep in the results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN. The first thing I noticed when I tested about a dozen different Swickis is that you can really segment your results and get real results that have the most relevance for people who are passionate about a topic.

From what Eurekster states on their FAQ page:

“Every click refines the Swicki’s search strings, creating a responsive, dynamic result that’s both customized and highly relevant.”

They’re not kidding! And Eurekster is willing to put it on the line and prove it. They provide a “compare results to Google” button right at the top of the search results. (When you click on that button Google comes up by default, but you can select any of the major search engines from the drop down in the upper right corner of the page.)

In most of the Swickis I tested I was blown away by the relevancy of the results compared to Google. The few Swickis that did not wow me with search result relevancy seemed to be controlling the influence on the results too tightly. Those Swickis were on sites or business blogs that were run by “old school” marketers.

“Rather than having just one view of the web there can be lots of different focused views of the web - focused search engines or Swickis. The best people to create these search engines are the people who are passionate about a topic - so we can created a tool to allow anyone to publish a search engine. It is a natural extension of creating a web page or blog or pod cast to create a search engine around a topic you and your community care about.”

With the built in tag buzz cloud, the engine makes interacting with and influencing the niche results of each Swicki. As the owner of the Swicki, you are in complete control and the only one with the ability to actively influence your Swicki.

Once Eurekster’s Swicki comes out of beta they’re planning on adding the options to have others (limited list or open public) actively influence the search results. For personal blogs and some niche business blogs this may be an option worth testing. But for most business owners marketing with blogs, you’ll still have the option to keep active influence control in the hands of only assigned individuals.

What I’d like to see added for business owners marketing with blogs

Testing the business blogging Swicki just began yesterday, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on traffic and tracking links over the next few weeks. As a business owner who markets with blogs and coaches others how to do the same, the variable levels of control make this the perfect technology that leverages social networking. It allows you to harness the wisdom of crowds without giving up total control (which is vital in a business environment.)

The one thing that I’d like to see more of is internal tracking from Eurekster. I’m assuming that some type of functionality will be added when they begin their contextual advertising opportunities. it would be great to see what the flow of traffic is like (inbound vs. outbound).

Other than that the Swicki looks like it will be a great tool to help boost exposure and traffic, making it easier to market with your blog.

If you’ve created a Swicki on your own site, share your results so far, creative applications, or ideas for improvement.

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

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 is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Click-and-Mortar Business Coach he helps small business owners integrate offline and online influence strategies for rapid, reliable business growth. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].