In the last couple of years that has been a growing trend called microblogging. Essentially, microblogging is throwing up a sentence or two in short bursts and many microbloggers do this several times a day. A lot of them claim it is good for business and have hundreds or thousands of people following them on the popular microblogging sites. Is it worth it?

Well, let me just list the top microblogging sites:

• Twitter (the most popular of all)
• FriendFeed
• Plurk
• Jaiku
• Pownce
• Identi.ca
• Kwippy

The last two on this list - Identi.ca and Kwippy - are the two newest microblogging sites to the list. The point behind these sites is to allow social media marketers and others who own websites the opportunity to market themselves in short bursts throughout the day.

While I don’t do any microblogging myself, I do see where it can be helpful. But microblogging is best done as an adjunct to regular blogging, not as a replacement. Most of these sites have word limits (Twitter’s like 140 words, or something) and you can’t write messages longer than those. That isn’t much space to include a blog post like this one that is full of information. Instead, what it does is allow you to shoot out quick promotions and if you have a lot of products and services to promote, or a lot of clients to promote then microblogging can be a great way to get your quick messages out there for the world to see.

I must confess: I’ve never given this much thought since I don’t run a lot of contests, but Small Fish Big Money makes a convincing case that e-mail newsletters are better for promoting contests than blog posts are. Is he right?

I know he is right about one thing - newsletters are more personal than blogs. With blogs, you are talking to an entire market, essentially an anonymous mass of individuals. With newsletters you are talking directly to opt-in subscribers, a more captive audience and people who have volunteered to receive your communications. While blogs also have subscribers, they are anonymous subscribers and your blog readers don’t necessarily have to subscribe to be regular readers. It’s just that subscribing makes it easier and more convenient for them to read when they want to read.

But what about contests? Should you promote them through your blog?

Personally, I’d say if you are running a contest you should use every means of communication at your disposal to promote it. That does include your blog, but I think SMBMs point in discussing the topic is to say that on-blog contests, where you run a contest solely through your blog, are risky. I’d have to agree with that.

That said, I have seen some successful on-blog contests, but those contests are generally geared toward a particular marketplace where the goal is to increase a blog’s readership. Give away a gift for the best comment on a blog post, offer a coupon or free service in exchange for the best trackback, or something of that nature. Those are good contests, but they are better contests if you have a meager readership and you are trying to increase it. If you have a large readership then you might turn off the people who are your regular readers.

Another thing to keep in mind with blog contests is that you might get people entering your contest who would never read your blog were it not for the contest. These are people who are not really a part of your target audience. They are there only for the freebie and once the contest is over, they’ll be gone. Do you really want to encourage that behavior?

Before you run a contest through your blog, think about what your goal is first. It is highly likely that your contest might best be announced through your e-mail newsletter then promoted lightly through your blog and social networks. That’s my Small Business Maverick suggestion for the day.

If you missed the last Biz Blogging Basics, you’ve got another chance to learn everything you can about business blogging from one who’s been there and got the T-shirt. Of course, this is a local course for people living in and around Minnetonka, Minnesota. There is another Biz Blogging Basics class scheduled for August 7.

Normally, you’d pay $100 per hour for this knowledge. But for 3 hours, I will cover all the basics for just $50. What a bargain!

You’ll learn:

• What a blog is and why you need one
• Why search engines LOVE blogs
• How to create blog posts that attract search engine spiders like flies caught in a web
• How a blog can increase your website traffic
• Why free blog hosts are no good and which blogging platform is the best
• Which type of blog is the right blog for you
• Tips on how to name your blog
• And a whole lot more

The class size is limited which means that you’ll get a chance to ask questions that are pertinent to your unique situation. For more information about Biz Blogging Basics, head over to SocialWebTraining and get all the details.

Carl Ocab is 13 years old. He’s got to know what he’s doing then, right? You would think so. And, actually, you’d be right. He’s one savvy kid. Here’s his advice about the best way to go about social media marketing:

• Write a top list
• Blog on topic
• Provocative blogging
• Reduce advertisements
• Spell check
• Self submit - don’t do it, he says!
• Write back
• Show statistics

Some of the examples Carl gives regarding these points are a little bit out there. For instance, he points to John Chow as the example for why you should show your statistics. But John Chow makes $20,000 a month. He’s got a good reason to brag. If you only make $50 per month from your blog then that might not be a reason to brag, unless your audience is people who don’t make any money. But even then it might not draw new readers to your blog.

The point is to be careful about how much you disclose. If you brag about your accomplishments, do in a non-braggadocios way. And don’t say too much. You don’t want a reputation as a blabber. Just stick to the sketch, don’t draw a whole portrait.

I do agree with reducing advertisements and spell checking. And don’t submit your own stuff. That’s not good. He’s right that social media people don’t like that.

On blogging, provocative blogging can be good but don’t get too provocative too often. Keep it restrained. And when blogging “on topic” make sure that you are blogging relevant to your audience. Don’t just blog about something because it’s popular. Blog about it because your audience is interested. And most importantly, play by the KISS rules. People don’t like long, drawn out posts that use complex sentence structures. You aren’t Hemingway, and even if you are, pare it down some. It’s the social media way.

OK, you may not think of yourself as a little guy and maybe I’m being a little bit condescending, but let’s face it - small business owners need every little edge we can get. Can’t we?

There are a ton of social media tools out there that can help you make the most of your online marketing efforts. Some are worth it and some aren’t. Erica DeWolf has put together a little blog post highlighting a few of the tools that you can find useful. Among them are:

• Facebook
• Blog
• RSS feeds
• Podcasts
• Videocasts
• Twitter

I can vouch for most of these myself. For business social networking I like LinkedIn, but I’ve heard that many marketers have been successful with Facebook (it’s probably a generational thing). But I highly recommend blogs and RSS feeds. What Erica says about RSS feeds, that you can use them for anything, not just blogs, is true.

Two things that work really well with RSS feeds are podcasting and videos. Two very powerful methods of marketing that allow you to communicate with your customers as if they were right in front of you.

I don’t have any personal experience with Twitter, but it is a hot item right now. I highly recommend that you include some form of social media marketing into your mix of marketing strategies. For a consultation on which methods might work for your situation, contact Small Business Mavericks today.

I agree. Spammers are no fun to hang out with. That’s why you need to be real careful about your comment policy. WordPress automatically makes all links no-follow. That means a link that you create from a WordPress blog back to your own blog does not compute for link building purposes. Get all the links you want and you are not going to help your link building strategy.

But, wait a minute …

WordPress has a plugin. Bloggers who install the WordPress do-follow plugin are setting themselves up for spam. As soon as you make all of the links on your blog pass on the link juice then everybody and pet dog wants to get in on the action. You essentially become the easiest girl in your class. Is that the kind of reputation you want?

I understand the desire for webmasters to want to reward their comments with the much coveted link credit. But know that when you do that you are opening up the spam dam so the flood can rush through. A better alternative might be the plugin that passes do-follow juice only to the top commentators on your blog. New commentators must earn the right to get that juice by leaving well-thought-of useful comments over a period of time.

Sounds like a good compromise to me. I’m sure Matt will agree.

AdSense is a monetization model that has made a lot of people money. So should you place AdSense ads on your company blog?

I agree with this blogger who says “No.”

Your company blog is there to drive traffic to your website and to close sales. You want to attract targeted customers and to do business with them. If you place AdSense ads on your blog and your readers click those ads they will be leaving your blog and heading over to your competition to do business with them. The thousands of dollars you stand to lose in business to your competitors will more than offset the few dollars you’ll make on the AdSense ads.

If you want to tap into AdSense as a revenue source then I recommend that you set up an information-only type blog and keep it updated with well-optimized content. Put all the AdSense on it you want. Your readers will click the ads and you’ll make money. Since you aren’t selling a service on those types of ads you can get away with the clicks that take your readers elsewhere. Don’t confuse your monetization models. Competing models work, but you don’t want them on the same properties.

I got this e-mail the other day, another spammer looking for publicity:

Hello , I am Katherine Villete and I am writing to offer you my services. I have been a consistent blogger and I have learned that you have been looking for bloggers to make a review on your site. At present, I can offer my 130 blogs with different IPs, and all blogs are technorati claimed which can surely help you increase ranking in SERPs and increase your Technorati authority which is good in SEO. I will write you good and well-written reviews which will be composed of 150 to 200 words each review with 3 links with your keywords and image in each of the post. I will be creating 130 completely unique articles about your site. Also, if your interested on sitewide link then i have 10 PR6 blogs i can offer you. If your interested, please let me know. Katherine Villete ————————— reply with “remove me” and you will deleted to the mailing list.

First, Katherine, I didn’t ask you to e-mail me so you’re guilty of spam. That’s illegal. But aside from the obvious illegal aspects of this e-mail I’d like to address the offer.

I’m not sure where you learned that I was looking for bloggers. I have not been looking for people to review my site at all. I think, rather, that you just made it up. After all, you are a spammer and a lawbreaker so why should anyone believe you when you say “I have learned”? The fact is, I’m not looking for bloggers to review my site at all.

Wow, 130 blogs? You write that many? You must not have a life. It’s great, though, that they all have different IPs. That way, if I was interested in the unethical practice of paying for a positive review then it would be nice to know that these reviews didn’t sit side by side together on the same server so that Google would know that I’m not abiding by their guidelines. Oh, and you’ve claimed them all on Technorati? That’s an even better bonus. It would be nice to know that Technorati would see the links from your 130 blogs to mine and give me credit for those.

But I didn’t know that a higher Technorati authority was good for SEO. It might help, a little. But, honestly, the best SEO in the world is quality content every day and content on your blogs is not going to help my blogs a whole lot. Content on my blogs will help tremendously. As you can see, I post to my blog every day and it seems to be doing quite well on its own.

Your offer to write reviews of 150-200 words with three links and an image in each review is such a meager offer even though you don’t mention price. You see, I know that three links is no more valuable than one. Google isn’t going to give me link juice for all three links - it’s one of their spam control measures. They’ll give me credit for the first link and after that linking is beneficial only as a traffic-driving measure. How much traffic could I expect from your 130 blogs? You never tell me that.

Images won’t matter. They’re not crawlable. I’ll get no SEO benefit from the image. And what would it be anyway? A screenshot of my blog? No thanks. No benefit there.

Completely unique articles? That’s nice because you know that 130 articles that were exactly the same would be duplicate content articles and that wouldn’t help you much. I really couldn’t care less because 130 articles on your websites will only serve as content issues for you, not for me. Oh yeah, but you mentioned links, didn’t you? Only one per blog post and, yes, the fact that each article would be different from the next would help - as long as the search engines don’t discover that I paid for them.

Sitewide links? Besides the obvious grammar errors, which won’t look good for either of us if I decide to use your services (not likely), what do you mean by “sitewide links”? Are those links that point to every page on my site? And why do you offer 10 PR6 blogs? Since PageRank is almost useless as a measure of success now, it doesn’t really matter what your PR is. And if I’m supposed to be impress by your 10 PR6 sites then tell me what PR your other 130 are. If they are below PR5 then they won’t help a great deal because, as you can see, my website is a PR4. While links from PR3 sites might be OK, they are not going to be as powerful as links from a PR5 site nor will they be as powerful as links from sites that are within the same niche as mine. But you never tell me what kind of sites your 130 sites are, do you? Are they rubber manufacturing sites? Travel sites? General spam sites? If they are not Internet marketing site as mine is then they will be of very little value to me.

Katherine, I am not only NOT interested in your offer, but I would report you to Google if I knew which URLs to report. Your offer provides very little benefit to me and actually risks doing me harm if I were stupid enough to accept it. It looks like you’ll be looking for another sucker today. Good luck in finding one.

Sincerely,

Caroline Melberg
Chief Executive PITA (Pain In The A**)
Small Business Mavericks

If you have a blog and you are wondering what you can do to increase its effectiveness without breaking your budget then take a look at these five free Internet marketing strategies that compliment blogging well:

• Article Marketing - Article marketing has been around for a long time. You can write an article and distribute it online quickly and easily. Totally free unless you use a ghostwriter or hire someone to do the distribution. Even then it’s relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing. It requires consistency and you can use your author resource box to drive traffic to your blog.
• Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is the natural sister to blogging. If you have a blog, promote it through social bookmarking. Very easy and free if you do it yourself.
• Press Release Distribution - Press release distribution is more expensive than any of the others on this list. To be most effective, you’ll have to pay something for the best distribution. But if you do this only when you have a great promotion then you’ll get a good response from your efforts.
• Podcasting - To do podcasting correctly you’ll have to spend some time on it, but you can do it yourself for no money. And it does drive traffic right where you want it to go.
• Video Marketing - Many bloggers use videos on their blogs. It’s called video blogging and it’s very effective. If you can speak into a camera you can do this. YouTube makes it very easy to upload your photos and it has a huge traffic base from which to draw.

These five Internet marketing methods are great compliments to your blog and easy to incorporate into your daily routine.

Lee Odden wrote a post about why business blogs fail. I’d have to concur that those are five of the most common reasons why business blogs don’t make it. He also offered this suggestion as a starting point:

As blog consultants, we encourage companies to start their own internal blogs and see what’s involved. That way they can appreciate the challenges of developing a successful blog.

I’ve never thought of that, but that’s a good thing to do. I’d also suggest finding other blogs within your niche and commenting on them before you start your own. Understand what a reader of blogs encounters so that you can make your blog more reader oriented. If you understand blogging from a readership perspective then you’ll be a much better blogger.

When you do start blogging, brainstorm for ideas before you start. Write down your top 20 most important keywords. Under each keyword, think of 10 potential posts. Write them down using the keyword within the title of the idea. That is a potential post title. If you do that then you’ll have 200 blog post ideas before you ever start blogging. Do this for your internal company blog, which is just a practice blog for now. If you can’t keep an internal blog going for 200 days then you’ll never be able to manage a public company blog long term. In that case, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t blog, but it may mean that you should look for a blog ghostwriter or someone who specializes in managing commercial blogs.