Newsletter: Blogs, Feeds, And Just What Podcasting Needs

Valuable information sent to subscribers in September, 2006.

September 29, 2006
Found in: Articles : Editorial : Newsletters :

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Can a "blog" help me?

Have you ever kept a diary of your thoughts? Have you ever read a diary of another's thoughts? Anyone who uses the Internet much has probably heard the word "blog" before. The word "blog" is short for "web log" which is simply an online journal or diary from a particular author. Blogging, the verb for maintaining a blog, has grown over the past two years and has taken a variety of shapes and sizes. Technorati, a blog analytics company, says a new blog starts about every three seconds.

Would a blog help grow your business?

Maybe. There are always a myriad of things that could be done so assessing the value of each should be a start. Blogging brings a more intimate form of communication to a web site and often provides a feedback vehicle directly to the author. How this relates to your specific business is a good conversation with prospects and buyers -- and many have achieved significant business growth from starting a blog.

I have included a couple examples of how our clients are using a blog below. We would love to help you evaluate how blogging might help grow your business.

Examples:

Foursquare Schools Blog
The One Ring Tolkien Blog
Banks Power Diesel Blog

>> We would love to talk more about how a blog could be part of your solution.

Readers Digest For The Internet?

Many of us have seen this small periodical on a coffee table or in the magazine rack at a friends home. The great thing about Readers Digest is that it brings lots of different stories and sources together in one simple volume that is easy to read. This concept has also been brought online.

Many news sites and blogs now offer "feeds" or a way to view the information on the site without having to actually come to the site. The concept is similar to a Security console viewing multiple security camera images within a single television screen. On the web, the "screen" is a software application called a "Feed Reader" or "News Aggregator".

This allows viewing updated information from multiple web sites that offer a "feed" within a single interface. Often other indexing, tagging, and bookmarking tools are available too. Creating these feeds manually can be quite a bear, especially if you publish information on your site frequently.

Fortunately, Site Director enables this service to your audience already. Your news, image galleries, even mp3 files can be turned into feeds (podcasts) that your audience can view from afar. Often these feeds are simply summarized versions of the real information encouraging viewers to click through to the full article within the web site, thus allowing greater ability to incentivize repeat visitors.

Feed Examples:

The Foursquare Church Syndicated Articles
Foursquare Women Blog Category

Reader Examples:

Google Reader
The Feed Wicki
Sage Extension for Firefox

Update:

The SearchRank Blog notes that a recent study (Sept 2006) shows RSS Feeds as mentioned above are making inroads in the Business to Business market:

• 80% claimed to be blog readers, with 51% of those reading blogs at least once a week.
• 53% say they read blogs weekly for business information while 57% read them for technology topics.
• As for referrals, 70% of respondents recommend or pass along content at least once a month.
• More than 53% said that the content they read in blogs affected their work-related purchasing decisions.
• Almost 50% said they commented or contributed to blogs they read at least monthly.
• 32% are seriously considering starting their own blogs.
• As for RSS feeds, 59% were "somewhat" to "very" familiar with RSS while 31% subscribed to RSS feeds or readers.
• 79% are accessing RSS feeds on specialized topics while only 36% are accessing blogs via RSS feeds.
  

>> We would love to talk further about how feeds and syndicating your news and information could be helpful.

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Broadcasting Treaty

Just a quick note about a legal issue you will want to know about. At Enthusiast, we want our clients to be informed and empowered to make the best decision possible for how to market and grow their business. Many of our clients leverage media such as audio and video to add value to their information.

There are some proposals for changing copyright law that could have significant impact on the use and reuse of these media files over the Internet. I encourage you to follow the link below to learn more and how you can take action to encourage public debate on the issue.

>> We have written an article with more details here.