I’m looking for business sites that look like Web sites, not like blogs, on the home page at least (of course, a blog can be attached to the site, and it should be).  The goal of the series is to not only show how flexible blogging applications like WordPress are, but also to show how great a business Web site can look when it’s built on WordPress (or another blogging application).

Plus, really cool submissions might even be featured in my upcoming book coming out in 2011, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress”, but the first priority is sharing the great work businesses are doing in leveraging blogging platforms to create awesome Web sites here on BusinessLogs.

To submit your business site for consideration in the series, just leave a comment on this post with your site’s URL. Chosen submissions will appear in a future blog post with screenshots of your site and links back to your site.

Note that the series won’t critique sites but rather provide an overview of the cool things site owners are doing with WordPress, etc. to build their businesses and brands.

Feel free to share this request with your own audiences via Twitter, Facebook, your business blog, etc.!  Let’s find some really great business sites built on WordPress, etc. to highlight here on BusinessLogs!

The reason for this is simple.  No one cares about you.  Instead, they care about how you can help them or add value to their lives.  The key to social media marketing success is engagement and interaction.  No one will want to interact with you if all you ever do on the social Web (including on your business blog) is talk about yourself.

Think of it this way — if you were at a party talking to another person and that person spent the entire time talking about himself, it’s unlikely you’d want to continue talking to him.  In fact, you’d probably want to escape and stay away from that person for the rest of the night and in the future.  You don’t want the online audience to feel that way about you!  Therefore, your business blog content should be primarily non-promotional.

Don’t worry.  You can still publish promotional content if that content is truly useful and interesting to your audience, but don’t go overboard.  You need to provide substance first and promotion second (a distant second).  The power of social media marketing (including business blogging) comes from the customer relationships that develop from it.  It’s an incredibly effective form of indirect marketing that should be a vital component of any business’ long-term marketing strategy.

So then what’s a business owner to do?

I recommend that businesses spend 80% of their time on the social Web engaging in non-promotional conversations and publishing and 20% or less of their time on self-promotional activities.  Additionally, try to ensure that 80% of the content and conversations that are published on your business blog are not self-promotional.  The 20% (or less) of self-promotional content on your business blog, however, should still add value to the user experience on your blog.  Simply regurgitating press releases or marketing brochures doesn’t add value.  Take the time to make sure all self-promotional messages are actually useful to your audience.  Don’t let that day arrive!

Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf?  He continually called for help to be saved from peril simply to get attention until no one bothered responding to him anymore.  Eventually, he truly did need help and everyone assumed he was just “crying wolf” again.  They ignored him again to his detriment.  That story also applies to business blogging and social media marketing.  If you garner a reputation for only publishing self-promotional content, people will start to expect only that kind of content from you.  If that content doesn’t add value to their lives, they’ll start to ignore you.  The day will come when you really do have something valuable to say or share, but no one will pay attention because they only expect self-promotion from you.

Image: stock.xchang

Many business owners think of blogging as a chore that delivers little added-value to a company’s bottom-line, but the truth is actually exactly the opposite.  A business blog is an incredible tool for search engine optimization because of what I call the compounding effect of blogging.

First, you need to understand consumer behavior in the 21st century:

Where do you go to find information about a business, product, store, etc. when you need it? Do you check the Yellow Pages?  Nope.  The vast majority of consumers turn to Google or their favorite search engine (with Google being #1).

Here’s how the compounding effect of blogging phenomenon works:

1. You have a business Web site made up of 20 pages.  That’s 20 entry points to your business Web site for Google to find, index, and deliver in relevant keyword searches.
2. You add a business blog to your Web site, and you publish a blog post everyday for a year.  Now you have 365+20=385 entry points to your business Web site for Google to find, index, and deliver in relevant keyword searches.
3. You publish posts on your business blog and those posts offer interesting, useful, helpful or entertaining content that your audience finds value in.  In other words, those posts are shareworthy.
4. People find your blog content and realize it’s interesting and shareworthy.  They share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. with links back to your business blog.  They blog about it on their own blogs with links back to your blog.  Now, the number of entry points to your business Web site (via your blog) has increased exponentially.  Your Google search traffic increases as all of these additional incoming links to your blog and Web site boost your Google search rankings, and traffic to your site from referrers across the Web increases, too!
5. Your Web site went from a static destination with 20 standard business entry points to an interactive, engaging site with hundreds or thousands (or more) of entry points and an increase in traffic from search engines and referrers!  You can’t buy that kind of exposure!

The compounding effect of blogging really is that simple.  It’s about creating shareworthy content and entry points, and it’s a form of marketing that business owners would be crazy not to leverage!

Image: Flickr

John Reese has a great thing to say about increasing your bottom line. He writes:

I recently had a great discussion with one of the top Internet marketers in the world, and someone who is a very close friend… Frank Kern. In this discussion I asked Frank this question…

“In your opinion, what’s the one major thing entrepreneurs should be doing right now?”

And his answer was simple… “Make offers.”

Making Offers and Business Blogging

This is a great tip for business bloggers as long as you don’t overdo it. After some time of publishing content and promoting your blog, you should have a good amount of visitors checking out your blog. This is a great time to start making offers. Here are a couple ways to do this.

First, you can talk about your products every couple of posts. You might say some interesting things about one of your products every 4-5 posts. Again, don’t over do this and turn your blog into just a sales pitch. Continue providing free valuable content about your industry. This encourages people who are not ready to buy to keep coming back to your blog. Oftentimes these people will buy later on after repeated exposure to your brand. Also, even if they never buy, they may tell their friends about your blog and your company.

Second, try giving your blog readers a discount. Create a promo code that is time sensitive. This would reward your readers that are keeping up with your blog and make them feel special.

Third, at the end of each of your longer posts (400+ words), have a small ad about one of your products. Or instead of a small ad, you can have a small paragraph about the product with a link to the product page.

Fourth, whenever you release a new product, make sure to blog about it.

The reason making offers works is because you’re being intentional in increasing sales. Many people need a little push to support your business before they actually buy something from you.

A blog helps you make offers effectively since blog readers will often perceive you and your company as an integral part of their life. Your blog will put a face to your company and you’ll become like an online friend to them.

And who are people more likely to buy from, a friend or a stranger?

After spending the last couple years watching blogs and blogging myself, I’ve seen several trends in blog life cycles.

First, blogs usually start off strong. They’ll have a consistent posting frequency for weeks and maybe even months. The bloggers are motivated to create a great blog, so the first couple of posts are high quality. This phenomenon is similar to new year’s resolutions. When the new year comes around, many people will start new workout programs or diet plans. They’ll go to the gym on a regular basis or avoid certain foods for the first couple of days of the new year.

However, just like most people that make new year’s resolutions, most new bloggers stop meeting their goals. They’ll skip a post here and there. They’ll write shorter articles. They won’t do as much research or spend as much time writing like they used to. Basically, they won’t put as much effort as they used to. Usually, the lack of effort can be tied to a lack of traffic.

New bloggers often get discouraged because of low traffic. They check their stats and they see that no one is reading their blog. They have no comments to reply to. As you can imagine, if no one is reading your blog, it’s easy to quit or blog halfheartedly. And even if a new blogger does manage to get some traffic, he could still be discouraged if the traffic plateaus for an extended time period.

Marketing is the Key

In my experience, the bloggers that get a lot of traffic on a consistent basis have been blogging for a while (usually over 2 years). So, it’s good to be patient. But what if you don’t have time to be patient especially if you’re counting on your blog to drum up more sales for your business in the next couple of months. Fortunately, there are some bloggers that have reached success quickly. Here’s what we can learn from them.

Marketing is absolutely crucial in the early days of a blog. The bloggers I have seen do well in a short time have spent a lot of time marketing their blog in the early days. Here are a couple things they have done to promote their blog:

• Leaving comments on other blogs
• Writing guest posts for other blogs
• Emailing other bloggers asking them to link to your posts
• Promoting your posts on social media sites

However you choose to promote your blog, the important thing is actually doing it. In your early days, you should spend at least 30% of your blogging time on marketing. My recommendation is to try different methods and then see which ones work the best. Then, focus on those methods and scrap the rest.

You still want to produce good content, but don’t fall into the trap of just writing good content. If you don’t promote your content, how will internet users know it’s out there? There are too many websites on the internet vying for same audience as your blog. Fortunately, most webmasters either don’t do much marketing or they do it poorly. Therefore, you can gain a big advantage by marketing your blog in a consistent manner.

After six months of solid marketing and content production, you should have a solid reader base. And since the internet is more social and interactive, some of your readers will also be content producers. They’ll have blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, or accounts on other social media sites like forums.

As you continue to produce great content, those readers will help you promote your site by spreading the posts they like on the social media sites they participate in. The bloggers will blog about your posts. Those with Twitter accounts will tweet about your posts. Your reputation will build as a result and you’ll be considered as an upcoming blogger in your industry. If your industry’s blogging community, or “blogosphere”, has a small amount of bloggers, you could even be considered a top blogger instead of just an upcoming one.

Your main goal as a new blogger is to reach that critical mass of readers who will regularly promote your content. If you look at any popular blog, you’ll see they get a lot of links without doing much promotion because of their reader base. Once you reach this point, your traffic should grow much more quickly. And then, you can probably lessen your marketing efforts and focus more on producing content that has a good chance of spreading since you have a reader base that wants to spread your ideas.

The Pareto principle, or the 80-20 rule, is a famous principle that says 80% of the results comes from 20% of the causes.

Many business people have taken this theory and applied it their businesses.

They’ll look at their salespeople and figure out the top 20% performers. Then, they’ll fire the low performing ones and try to hire people with characteristics similar to the top salespeople.

Or they’ll analyze their marketing activities and see which ones have been the most effective. Then, they’ll stop doing the ineffective activities and spend more time and effort on the effective ones.

The Pareto principle can even work with products/services. A business can figure out their most profitable product and then give that product more promotion than the other products.

How This Applies to Blogging

In blogging, you’ll have to do a little bit of trial and error to figure out the best strategies.

When you first start, you won’t know what works because you don’t have a lot of experience. However, as you begin publishing posts and doing a little bit of marketing, you’ll begin to notice certain things working and other things not working. When this happens, focus on the things that work and stop spending time on the things that don’t work.

Let’s look at some practical examples.

Keywords

Check out your analytics program for high performing keywords. You’ll sometimes find that you’re not fully targeting your best keywords.

For example, let’s say you run an online retail store that sells mp3 players. One of your best keywords is inexpensive mp3 players. However, the post that is doing well for that keyword is titled “Cheap mp3 Players”. You should retitle the post “Inexpensive mp3 Players”. This will make your post increase in the search results and you’ll get more traffic as a result.

Also, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a short keyword phrase (less than 5 words), it’s usually worth it to create other posts that are based on that phrase. For instance, if you have a lot of traffic from the phrase best rated mp3 players, you should write posts like

The Best Rated mp3 Players for Joggers
The Best Rated mp3 Players for Mac Users
The Best Rated Discount mp3 Players

The reason this tactic works is because many internet searchers will add modifiers to the main keyword phrase. Also, longer keyword phrases have less competition so it should be easy to rank well for them.

I advised my friend on this strategy. She had took her top keyword, modified it a little, and published a post based on the modified phrase. In less than two months, her new post was the fifth most visited post on her blog.

Post Topics

Certain posts on your blog will be a big hit to your audience. They will get a lot of traffic and positive comments.

For example, let’s say you’re a wedding planner and you have a blog to attract new business. You write a post about the timeline in wedding planning. The post does really well and seems to meet a need for many couples. You should take that post and do an series of related posts that cover each event in the timeline with more depth.

Social Media Marketing

I’ve already talked about participating in too many social media sites. It’s much more effective to focus on a few sites. For example, if you’re on three forums and one of them is sending much more traffic than the other two, stop participating on those two forums and focus your efforts on the top forum.

Over to You

What things have worked for you?

Would you have clicked and read any of these posts?

The first post got me curious and I read it. However, I skipped the other posts because their titles didn’t seem useful, interesting, or relevant.

This small event reminded me of the importance of writing attractive post titles.

Judging a Post by the Title

Those seven posts that I didn’t read may have been great posts, but since the titles were subpar, I didn’t even read them.

It may be unfair to judge a post by the title alone. But in our busy world where time and attention are scarce, people are making quick judgments on what information they will consume.

Usually your post titles are the first words people notice. Those words are the prominent words on RSS readers, search engine results pages, and social media sites like Digg. When internet users land on your blog home page, they’ll look at your titles and see if it’s worth reading your blog.

Writing Great Titles

Luckily, you don’t have to be an expert wordsmith to write good titles. There are simple yet effective principles. I’ll talk about some of these principles in future posts, so stick around.

Until then, here are 22 title templates that work well. Try them out on your next posts.

Photo by alifarid

The key to writing interesting content is being reader focused.

A common mistake in blogging is to only write about what interests you. However, by neglecting the interests of your readers, you’ll miss out on a lot of new traffic and repeat visitors.

If you follow some of the top blogs, you’ll find that they’ll often get comments like “This is exactly what I was looking for” or “I definitely needed to hear this”. Those bloggers understand what their audiences want and they give it to them on a consistent basis. That’s what makes their blogs so successful.

How to Figure Out What Your Readers are Interested In

So, how do you find out what your readers want? Here are a couple practical methods.

Browsing through forums is an excellent way to do research on your target audience. What you want to look for are threads that get a lot of responses. The topics on these threads are perfect topics for future blog posts. Also, watch out for recurring questions. Many people go to forums to ask questions. Writing in-depth blog posts that answer those questions will earn you a reputation as an expert.

While were talking about questions, Yahoo! Answers is another place where people ask questions. Simply search using common keywords in your niche and see what questions people are asking in your niche.

Keyword tools tell you the popular words in your industry that internet users are searching with. Writing blog posts based on these keywords will not only make your blog more interesting but it will increase your search engine traffic. Here are two free tools to try out: Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in the name of your industry and see what related words the tool gives you.

If you have a lot of traffic or a big enough email list, it’s a good idea just to ask your readers what kind of content they want. If you have little traffic or a small list, you might not get a lot of responses.

You Don’t Have to Guess

You could guess what content your audience finds interesting. But why guess if you don’t have to? A little bit of research before writing can go a long way to making your blog more interesting.

Photo by nms_007

Many business owners understand that starting a business blog is a good idea. However, they are hesitant to start blogging because the last time they wrote anything was years ago back in school. They don’t feel like they have the writing skill to attract an audience.

Well, here’s good news if you’re one of those business owners.

If you can talk, you can write.

I got this saying from a writing blog years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the URL or the name of the blog.

You Don’t Need to Be Shakespeare

A common myth in writing is that you have to have your grammar just right and you have to have a big vocabulary or no one will read you. This may be true if you’re writing for a scholastic journal or you’re writing a novel. But you’re not. You’re writing a blog on the web.

The web is an interesting medium. It started out without any commercial elements. And while many businesses have joined the web, the internet has also evolved into a social, interactive environment. Today’s Internet users are not just passive consumers of information. Instead, they are active participants.

They create the information and communicate with other users through sites like Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Also, many users have their own sites, which they update in their spare time. Most of these people are the average Joes and Janes. They are not English majors or budding authors. So, they are not going to grade your writing like your old English teacher.

The most important things in blogging are not your writing skill and vocabulary, but your expertise, experience, passion, and willingness to interact.

This blogger has over 30,000 subscribers and he definitely is not the most polished writer. His grammar is off in many places. He writes in a very conversational tone. And many of his sentences are clunky and wordy. But he does have something to say. He brings experience and expertise to the table and people listen to him.

I know a blogger from India who has hundreds of subscribers. English is not his first language so some of his blog posts have bad grammar. Yet he has a captive audience because of his passion and consistency.

Write the Way You Talk

As a business blogger, don’t be afraid to write the way you talk. As you write, pretend you’re actually communicating to a specific person that would fit your target audience. There are at least two benefits for doing this.

First, it makes you more personal. It shows that you’re a real person. This build trust and trust leads to sales. Too many businesses are guilty of stuffy, corporate speak. This type of writing makes those businesses seem cold and impersonal.

Second, it lowers your writing time. I believe that much of the time spent on writing is second guessing yourself and over analyzing your writing. However, if you write like you talk, you can write much more freely. And sure, it doesn’t hurt to reread what you’ve written and edit and rewrite as needed.

Billboards get ignored. TV watchers skip commercials with Tivo. The number of radio listeners is going down as people just listen on their iPod to their favorite songs. Newspaper and magazine circulation is declining.

You may think, well, I’ll just advertise on the web. But typical internet advertising is not working as well as it used to.

People are becoming more internet savvy. They are becoming more “blind to ads”. They’ve begun to realize what ads look like so they’re not clicking on them as much as before.

For example, big, flashy banner ads used to be effective at driving traffic a couple years ago, but now a lot less people click on them. These banners ads were replaced by text ads. Text ads get more clicks than banner ads, but as the internet knowledge and experience of online users increases, these ads will get less clicks.

This is already true with younger audiences, since they’ve grown up with the internet. I have a blog that targets the 14 to 30 year old crowd. I have text ads in a prominent location, but I usually only get one click per thousand pageviews.

All these things tell me that people are trying their best to avoid advertising. And technologies like Tivo, iPod, and the internet have made it much easier for them to do so.

So, what’s a small business owner to do? You need to get people’s attention to generate sales. I’ve written multiple times about the effectiveness of blogging to grab people’s attention. But what about advertising? Just give up on it?

No, I don’t think you have to do that. But in a world where advertising gets ignored, you have to do your advertising differently to get noticed. Here’s a simple principle to keep in mind.

Make Your Advertising Useful

Yesterday, I visited MapQuest to get driving directions. On their driving directions page, they had this section at the bottom of the page.

The picture and text highlighted in red caught my attention, because my car was having problems and I was afraid of being stranded during my upcoming out of town trip. I clicked the link and it took me to this useful, informative, interesting article.

By adding useful content to their ad, AutoZone was able to get my attention. However, if they just had the typical “great products and low prices” spiel, I would’ve ignored them.

I like what Brian Clark says:

The plain truth is, great content is the most effective way to advertise online, because to be considered great content, it can’t look anything like what we consider advertising.

So, next time you buy advertising, ask yourself: “How can I add something useful to my ad?”

I’ve written before that offering expert advice on a business blog is a great way to promote your business. The same principle works for advertising. By adding useful content to your ads, not only will you capture the attention of your target audience, but you’ll also improve your brand.

With all this social activity, the big question for businesses seems to be, “How do you actually interact and communicate with internet users to increase sales?”

Understanding the Average Internet User

To answer this question effectively, you need to understand the mindset of the average internet user.

The average user is not looking so much for slick packaging but authenticity.

Why authenticity?  Because in a social atmosphere like the social web, people act like people.  They don’t act like businesses.

The proper metaphor for the web is not an upscale retail store or stuffy office environment where employees interact with customers using “Sir” and “Ma’am”.

No, the web is much more like a laid-back pub or coffeehouse where people hang out.  These people value community and being real.

You may be wondering, since the web is like this, how does one do business?  You’re thinking, business doesn’t get done in a coffeehouse.

Well, maybe not the actual sale.  But realize that when people hang out, they often make product and service recommendations and non-recommendations.  Also, they show off their purchases.

Here are the type of conversations that go on all over the world, offline and online.

In a pub: “My car is having problems.  Could you recommend a trustworthy mechanic?  I went ABC Mechanic last month and they ripped me off.”

In a Starbucks: “Check out my iPhone.  It’s awesome.”

On Twitter: “Does anyone know if XYZ Web Hosting provides good service and 99% uptime?”

On a blog: “I just got my big screen TV from John Doe’s online store.  I definitely would recommend him to anybody.”

Be Real

If you come off like a business person, you won’t have success.  But if you interact with them like a real person, like a friend that actually wants to help, you’ll gain their trust. And trust is what leads to repeat sales and positive recommendations.

Aaron Wall wrote on page 68 of his discontinued SEO Book:

Write in a conversational tone, as a person, not a company.

Fake fluffery does not go well on the web. People can smell it a mile away. Since the Web started as a non-commercial entity, there are certain etiquettes (or netiquettes) that dictate how we should act. When we go outside these basic ideas, we not only avoid conversion, but also are likely to offend our readers.

Many of the people who have bought this e-book told me they bought it because I sounded honest and real. Some of my blog posts are somewhat random, personal, or humorous, and some people like that.

This is coming from a guy who’s sold over 13,000 copies of his ebook. Many of those were at the price point of $79 before the ebook was repackaged into a training program.

Evaluate Your Business

Look at the text on your website.

• Is it boring, bland, and filled with ambigious, overused corporate jargon?
• If you have a blog, are you writing in a conversational tone?
• Do you have pictures of you and your staff?

Think about how you communicate on social/community websites.

• Do you write like a real person that seeks to help?  Or are you still in the impersonal, corporate mode?

PR is now Personal Relationships not Public Relations.

I got the above comment from Tim Ferriss, the author of the bestselling book 4-Hour Workweek, in a podcast interview. Sadly, I don’t remember which interview it was.

Anyways, Tim Ferriss credits the success of his book to personal relationships. He got a lot of traffic and buzz for his book because many influential, high-traffic bloggers wrote about it.  He connected with these bloggers by meeting them in person at conferences. 

He wrote: 

My entire book cost $25,000 to launch, but subtract $18,000 of that because I was pressured to go with this PR firm at first, so I anted up $6000 a month for them to say, “We’re seeding the ground. We’re working on relationships. We’re just building up momentum.” After three months, they only got one print feature, so I cut it. The remaining money was spent going to conferences to meet bloggers in person.

Notice how much more effective he was versus the PR firm.

As the internet has become social, you don’t need a PR firm to capture the attention of your niche. Instead of hiring a PR firm, you can promote your business by leveraging personal relationships with the influential social media players in your industry. These people could be bloggers with a lot of traffic, popular forum posters, or influential StumbleUpon users.

The key is building relationships with these influencers.

But don’t just giving your product/service pitch. Instead, think in terms of a real life friendship. How does a healthy friendship work? Through give and take.

The influencers have something you want: influence over an audience. What can your give them in return?

In an interview, Tim Ferriss talked about how he made the initial connection with bloggers. Instead of mentioning his book right away, he first showed interest in them by asking them about themselves including their blog. Soon, they would ask about him and he was able to talk about his book in a natural way without having to resort to a “hard sell”.

In Tim’s example, we can see that he brought value to the relationship. He added value through his face-to-face friendship and his book.

You may not have time to go to conferences to meet bloggers like Tim. However, you can still build profitable friendships online. Jon Morrow of Copyblogger wrote a great post about networking. He gave these five great ideas: 

• Write a guest post that gets lots of traffic and adoring comments
• Volunteer to “vote” for any posts that they’re pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Email them an irresistible question, hoping to spark a discussion
• Leave lots of truly memorable comments
• Interview them in either a post or a podcast, making sure to ask lots of intelligent questions

You may not have time to write a book like Tim, but you can create a business blog that adds value to your industry.  

Social media influencers are always looking out for compelling content. If you publish remarkable posts, many of these influencers will link to your content. But first, you may want to build relationships before talking about your posts. This greatly increases your chance of getting a link.

However, now there is a third option that shouldn’t be ignored. With today’s technology organizations are capable of putting up pre-launch blogs to help maintain the visitors that come to their site.

Most recently I visited the website of my favorite magazine, Play, to find that they had a more sophisticated splash page then one may think. However, I also found that they are missing a great opportunity to improve their image and traffic while also saving a lot of time when their official site launches.

Their target audience consists of people who enjoy video games and technology and the number of people who visit their site is not known, but seeing how this crowd uses the web extensively you could imagine the loss of people their site experiences daily. What they could do is setup a little blog that has frequent updates so that people have a reason to return to the site.

They already have a basic layout on their site and they could fit a blog in there and start writing industry newsbits or keeping everyone updated to the inner workings of the magazine. They may plan on doing this already with their official site, but why not begin that process now?

The Benefits

What this does is help keep people interested in your company. More and more companies are going the route of releasing beta products, software, and websites and a pre-launch blog could be looked at in the same way. You could find out what type of features users want and what they expect to see or you could choose just to write small entries/articles for your readers to enjoy.

More importantly you get your site in search engines immediately. If you type in “play magazine” into Google you won’t even find their website in the first 50 results returned. Obviously, search engine traffic is something that cannot be overlooked, but this is exactly what they are doing. They spent the time to put together a basic website and by the time the real one launches, they will have to invest even more time in getting it established in the search engines.

If you put up a website like they have and then spend 5 months finishing the real one and assuming it takes 2 months to get your site thoroughly established in the search engines, you find that your company has lost 7 months of traffic. However, if you did the basic site with the blog, not only will you get in the search engines, but assuming quality content you will also find your site linked to by other sites. Once the official site launches your website is already moving in full-force with an established customerbase and all it took was a small blog.

If you were to use a hosted service such as Squarespace, you could easily setup a blog that provides interesting content and helps to maintain and grow a customer base before your official site even launches. Even though your site may not be done, it doesn’t mean your ability to win an audience can’t begin now.

The genius behind the Drama 2.0 blog posted his thoughts on the recession’s effect on the tech industry so I’m going to jump in and post two impacts of the recession right here.

What Will Get Cut First?
When budgets get tight and revenues aren’t as high as they were in the glory days, what will go first is marketing. You can’t dip on your core competencies and get rid of a dozen highly-skilled engineers because then you’re cutting your own throats. Getting rid of your top people and replacing them with low-level morons was the reason that CompUSA went out of business, and cutting the head off your engineering department is a similar mistake.

When advertising gets cut, the ones with the lowest ROI will be the first to get the slash, and that’s going to mean CPM advertising. With CPC, a company is putting all their effort into converting the click on their own website so they control the conversion rates. CPM ads put all the pressure on the publisher to get good click-through rates, and if they’re paying top dollar for CPM rates on popular sites and aren’t getting a good CTR, then it’s a waste of money. AdWords and AdSense aren’t going to drop much, but CPM rates will.

Investors Change Their Tune
VCs have been pouring dollars into companies like paper money is going out of style (*cough*) and 2008 will be the year they take a more careful look at their investments and investment strategy. Investing in pre-revenue companies with no revenue strategy is a lot different than pre-revenue companies that have a solid revenue strategy, and you can guess which type of company won’t be raising as much money this time around. The theory of “past success indicates future success” when it comes to startup founders is going to be flipped around and although an entrepreneur may have had a big name a few years ago, investors will realize it’s a totally new game in 2008. If you’re giving away the cow (the service) and the milk (unique value proposition) for free then you don’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to introduce a revenue model for your “at scale” company. You may be big, but you’re not sustainable. And money doesn’t grow on trees anymore.

Google’s Open Handset Alliance announced last week had a lot of hand-waiving and fun illustrations, but was short on actual product. Phones running Google’s Android platform are nearly a year away from being in consumer’s hands, so there are a lot of questions still up in the air. If Google were to acquire Sprint Nextel, it would certainly give more credibility to their hand in the poker game of their cellphone “alliance” and might open up some additional avenues in regards to generating revenue.

So many people hate the telecom industry and cable companies that if Google were to purchase Sprint and use their infrastructure to build out a high-speed, long-distance wireless network, I can see many people ditching Comcast or TimeWarner and jumping on the Google bandwagon. Broadband pipes are so locally saturated in the major metropolitan areas that wireless alternatives might be a good fit for people fed up with lobbyists having a larger impact on their cable companies then their own petitions. Personally I’d love to see Google sell a WiMAX set-top widget that would coordinate with a cellphone widget to push WiMAX speeds to me wherever I am. Unfortunately with Google pursuing the handset alliance it seems if these pipe dreams (no pun intended) come true, iPhone users will be left out in the cold. At least until a 3G iPhone appears and by then anything is possible.

“With Australia’s population of 21 million, we comprise 5 per cent of English speakers. But with 75 blogs out of 9000, we comprise less than 1 per cent of English blogs. We are underrepresented by a factor of six or so.”

It seems like lack of bandwidth availability in Australia might be a key problem, but are there other factors that might be contributing?

After the application launched, we spoke with our friend and designer [name removed] who happens to work in the Aperture software group at Apple. He/she didn’t tell us much detail about the specifics of his/her part in the software, but he/she did tell us that some of the interfacing uses Apple WebKit, Apple’s open source web rendering framework. Besides Safari, Mail, and now Aperture, there are a ton of other applications out there using HTML/CSS rendering inside their desktop-based software on Mac OS X or other platforms. That makes CSS geeks like me happy. Very, very cool.

CSS As An Interface Language

Prior to Firefox taking off as a browser, not many people really dug into the innermushings of how the Fox puts its pixels on your screen in a cross-platform manner. It may or may not be common knowledge, but every single button, image, and text element that comprises the chrome (FF user interface, everything outside the HTML render box) is actually a combination of XUL and CSS. XUL (XML User Language) is a specialized XML dialect that lets people define semantically-rich user interface widgets, which then allows the CSS to completely style them.

If you’re thinking about writing a Firefox extension, it’s really not that difficult because the extension’s interface can be designed using CSS and XUL. Last February (for my final college class) I did an independent study where I coded and designed a sample Firefox extension that lets the user lookup words in a dictionary. Not very complicated, and it’s already been done before, but I thought it would be a good exercise. I wrote about the process and it became a nice little tutorial for Googlers looking for Firefox extension how-to articles.

Aperture

Apple Aperture is gorgeous, absolutely stunning. I started thinking about how amazing it would be if more than just a small part of this software’s interface was designed in CSS, like, if the entire thing was. Imagine Cocoa or C API hooks into an XUL interface, that could be easily designed using CSS. Interface Builder could be modified so that all the interface widgets you drag into your application would write out XUL code, and then you can apply stylesheets to different sections just like you would with the FF chrome or a website. Right now Interface Builder writes out XML to NIB files but I’d like to see the proprietary (I believe) NIB file format moved over to XUL, and then we could have some really sexy cross-platform stuff coming out.

CSS-Based Designers

Right now, most CSS coders/gurus get work to code websites, but what if software engineering teams started hiring them to design desktop application interfaces too? That would really bridge the divide between “engineers” and “designers” that we know all too well.

Plug ‘n Pray

I got some good answers in the comments section about what I was looking for, unfortunately, many of the answers told of afterthought features developed as plugins. Bernd says:

Just add a Weblog Manager into the Plugin Architecture of the CM, just like you add a News Database, a Forum or an RSS Aggregator.

Unfortunately that’s where a lot of the current offerings are coming from. Out of the box a large framework is developed that lets everybody and their brother write modules and plugins to extend functionality, but do we really need that? I just want the features I need, designed intelligently, from the get-go. Jeffrey Veen says it too after exploring open source CM solutions for a few hours:

What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks.

He’s right. I don’t see elegant solutions either. James Archer has a great point as well:

I think that the two biggest problems facing CM systems are that they work on adding features rather than improving existing features, and that they’re often designed by software engineers rather than designers. Instead of a tight, smoothly-operating and flexible content management system, we too often wind up with some abomination like PostNuke.

Not Really “Content Management”

I mean web publishing, not content management. CM solutions offer taxonomy development, powerful workflow management, dynamic blah blah blah, and a lot more. I’m talking about web publishing software that lets me manage a weblog as part of a full website, a wiki as part of an intranet, templates that can be extrapolated across multiple pages, etc. To me that’s not really full-blown content management, but rather web publishing — you know, software for web designers with clients that aren’t in Fortune magazine. Or as Jason Fried would call it, the Fortune 5,000,000.

The Contenders

To their credit, I took a look at both ExpressionEngine and Drupal (different price points, but who cares) but they both made me cringe in humiliation as a web professional. I used a demo for EE and without clicking, couldn’t tell you what 2 out of the 7 top tabs (Communicate and Modules) actually let me do, but maybe that’s the usability junkie inside of me coming out to say hello, I’m not sure. Then I looked at some Drupal screenshots and was equally offended. It’s as though nobody who cares about the user experience designed these pieces of software. I mean, should I be accepting these as the best web publishing tools out there and just use them? Should I just accept this as the best we can do?

Fuck It, I’ll Make My Own

With all the spare time I have now (absolutely none, whatsoever) I’m going to do web publishing software my way. Everything I want, nothing I don’t want, and better designed than the rest put together. Made for people who actually need to get work done, and not just plop forums and photo galleries into their sites because it’s a button they can click. It will be built with PHP, let you use any template tags you want (define ones that make sense to you, what a novel idea!), and I’ll be designing the user interface first because the interface is the software.

I’ve got some questions, and hopefully you’ve got the answers. What’s really important to you? Do you need 5 different ways to deal with comments or would “on or off” be good? Are plugins necessary if the right functionality is built in from the start? How complex is your publishing workflow, and do you need software to manage it?

Make a list of the 5 killer features you need your web publishing software to have. Then remove 2 of them and let me know what remains. That’s how software should really be built: without superfluous bullshit that 1% of users need.

Anil explaining what happened back in the 90s:

Interestingly, most bubble companies, especially those with unsustainable models, ended up flipping to one of the big players (AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, later Google) or one of the then-big players (Lycos, Excite, et. al). This would happen after the initial run-up in stock value, and would end with a crash or a slow slide, after which the VCs made money, founders made a little bit of money, and everybody else pretty much ended up underwater.

So basically bubble companies would go IPO, get a huge run-up in value, then their stock would deflate, and a floundering has-been Dot Com would be sold to a major tech figure for a few stacks of bennies. Now, small teams are creating mashup faux-companies, generating lots of buzz, and are acquired prior to making any real money. The end result of both scenarios is nearly the same dollar figure.

Is this the new economy? Do revenues no longer matter? Is buzz and site traffic the real measure of success? Are pre-money valuations pulled from thin air, or out of asses, or both?

I also don’t see many start-ups attempting disruptive things in the non-geek space. I see plenty of events web apps, tons of RSS Aggregators, lots of AJAX-powered office apps. But what about Web 2.0 applications that will tackle things like health, finance, education, government?

Richard is talking about disruptive startups — companies who actually break the mold and innovate rather than emulate, mashup, and wait for the quick flip. The problem I see is that every new “web 2.0″ company targets the same audience: 20-somethings who socially bookmark their life, use RSS to track weblogs, and seemingly can’t find any restaurants without needing someone else’s opinion. Is this the best our industry can do?

Two years ago I worked at Northrop Grumman designing missile defense software, and let me just say, it could be a HELL of a lot better. I think we should take the best designer and the best programmer from all the new “web 2.0″ startups, put them all in a new company, and have them design military software. Or content management software. Screw social networking (I like actually meeting my friends), let’s make real applications better.

Colin’s take. What’s your take?

Could Inman and Veen be going up against each other head-to-head? Or is it the same application? Or will Mint be released before Adaptive Path has their party? Who will win the battle of the snazziest traffic-monitoring buzzword-filled web application?

Whoa baby, as soon as this post went live I’ve got all sorts of people coming out from the woodwork telling me more about the Adaptive Path application. Here’s what I know so far:

It’s called “Measure Map”. MeasureMap.com isn’t up yet, however a quick WHOIS lookup reveals that it’s registered to Lane Becker, Adaptive Pather extraordinaire.

It’s written in Ruby. Why is this important? Because that means it won’t be something you “download and install” on your own web server like Shortstat or Mint. Ruby is too new a language to have people figure out how to install it themselves, therefore I’m pretty sure that Measure Map will be a hosted application, unlike Mint. I don’t think I like that aspect much.

As with all pre-release software info, take these with a grain of salt. I could be talking out of my ass here, or I could be spot-on, who knows.

While I don’t wish to get into the merits of why this will or won’t work, I do think it is interesting to note how fast this piece of news spreads across the web due to the power of blogs. When doing any type of fundraising drive it is important to get your message out quickly and in front of as many eyeballs as possible because you are working with a deadline.

At last count Kottke had 15 trackbacks pointing to the entry (16 including this one) and it has only been published for 2 hours. Over the week this will get over 50 trackbacks (my guess) and will probably be picked up by Wired or some other mainstream publication who will see this as a new venture, but if you have been reading blogs for the past 2 years you will know this is old hat.

Oh look it’s on MetaFilter as well.

Now don’t get the wrong idea about what he is doing. This has been tried before with both successes and failures. Also, this type of news wouldn’t spread as quickly if it was someone else. What makes this exciting is that blogs make this type of venture possible (successful though is another story).

Best of luck goes out to Jason. I have been living off of blogs for the past year now and don’t see myself turning back. Of course I use a different (and safer) strategy…

For popular link blogs who rely on advertising, this user scenario is their kryptonite. Sites like MeFi and Fark rely on advertising as a means of keeping their servers running and their writers well fed. It can be asserted that people like me who grab that content via the RSS feed are decreasing their advertising revenue, however they are not at the stage yet where this loss actually prevents them from running the site anymore. With the growth and popularity of the RSS information medium however, what will happen when that time comes and too many people read via RSS and not enough click on the ads? Will the sites shut down?

The Next Stage of Advertising

Our friends at 37signals are running an experiment to splice advertisements into their blog’s RSS feed, not as a real way to generate revenue, but just to see the viability of it and gather user’s opinions. Unfortunately, at this point 123 people have commented on that post and the majority of them were aghast at the idea of advertising jumping into the sacred medium of RSS feeds. But wasn’t this inevitable? RSS content is just another information-delivery medium after all, and quality information is never free. Remember, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I feel as though targeted advertising inside of RSS isn’t asking much, especially because if you already subscribe to their feed to begin with, clicking on some ads once in awhile to support the site is a nice altruistic thing to do.

There will come a point in 2-3 years, maybe sooner, where everyone will be using RSS to get their information. News websites will lose revenue from a lack of advertisement click-throughs, personal weblogs might not be published as frequently because it’s not cost efficient anymore, and advertisers will be scratching their heads trying to figure out what can be done to salvage their industry. So what can be done? Will advertising shift over to RSS as well? Will content providers start locking down their feeds with only the title of the post and nothing more, forcing people to go to the real site to read the story? What’s the future look like?

Weblog is a Dirty Word

Our company is named Business Logs, which is in part a way to move the thoughts of business executives away from associating “weblogs” with “personal ranty dialogs run by teenagers” — a stereotype that LiveJournal and others helped perpetuate — and into the mindset of a weblog being a viable communication medium they need to embrace. You probably won’t hire us to develop a weblog if you still feel as though “weblog” is a dirty word.

A Communicative Exchange

A weblog can be thought of as a two-way communication device, where authors
publish material, and readers give feedback. This is no different than
the human communication model of one person speaking, another listening,
and then the listener offering their feedback again to the speaker. This
cyclic communication model applies to various mediums, and a weblog is just
another version of it.

Traditional forms of media are one-way communication devices. Dan Rather
informs viewers about the news of the day, and millions of people sit back
on their couch and soak it all in. He doesn’t take your calls. He doesn’t check
his cellphone for SMS-messaged questions from a guy named John in Nebraska. He tells you what is on his teleprompter, and that’s the way it goes.

A magazine or newspaper is a slightly modified version of a one-way communication
exchange. Readers can voice their thoughts in the form of “Reader Mail” or on the
Editorial pages. However it may take weeks for your opinion to reach the newsstands,
so if it was related to time-sensitive information, tough luck. A magazine or newspaper
is not an instantaneously updated feedback device — it was never supposed to be.

A Twist on Traditional Media

Now people are taking the weblog medium to the next level by publishing magazines
online. This turns the traditional medium upside-down by introducing
a feedback mechanism which is a sure-fire way to work with your content on a whole different
level. Now you can publish your magazine articles a few times per week,
and interact with your readers at the same time. Jeffrey Zeldman et. al. were some of
the pioneers of this magazine-as-weblog format with A List Apart.
Now there is Boxes and Arrows and
Digital Web taking up the medium as well
just to name a few.

You can start a magazine too! Find a topic you know a lot about, find some writers
who are desperately seeking an outlet for their knowledge and creativity, put up a website
powered by the weblog software
of your
choice, and you’re done. Now fill it with content,
add some pages in there for your “editorial staff”, target your audience, and if the mix
is stirred just right you may have a hit website on your hands.

You can start out by using Google’s AdSense advertising to generate some revenue, and then
when you start pulling down a few dozen thousand uniques per month, you can move up to
some other type of advertising that is more lucrative. Split up your advertising revenue
amongst your writers (keeping more for yourself though, it was your idea!), pay for your
hosting, drop some money into web advertisements, send out press releases, tell your friends,
send out emails, comment on other weblogs, and guess what? You may actually be
profitable at some point soon.

Sounds too good to be true? Nope, it happens everyday.