It wasn’t long ago that consumers had a limited selection of companies that they could choose to deal with. This was often dictated by geographical boundaries, how much or what type of advertising was used, and specific needs. That isn’t the case anymore. Thanks to the internet and the declining cost to advertise through a growing number of mediums, companies are able to compete on a national and sometimes even global scale. Gone are the days of being the only video store or travel agent in town. Now all a consumer has to do is spend a few minutes signing up at Netflix?or browsing Travelocity?from the comfort of their home or office.

Some companies are making it easier for consumers to get what they want, how they want it, when they want it, adding a certain level of transparency to their respective industries. A consumer doing their research is probably going to know more about how you stack up against your competitors than you do most of the time. If you’re concerned about this, it may be because you aren’t doing everything you can to provide the best possible service or product to justify the price you’re charging. It could also be because you don’t know enough about your competitors and their business practices.

Rather than looking at this new playing field in a negative light, you can use it to your advantage. Consumers can quickly compare your product, service and price to most or all of your competitors ? often in a matter of hours if not less, but you can do the exact same thing! By keeping tabs on what your competitors are doing you will be more competitive because you are proactive. You’ll be keeping them reacting to what you are doing rather than the other way around.

Are you ready to start competing on a new level? Set aside some time and do your homework. Learn as much as you can about your three biggest competitors and then stay one step ahead of them. You’ll be surprised how much your profits increase!

August 17-19, 2005 Blog Business Summit - San Francisco , Califonia

Keynote: Why Microsoft is Betting Big on Bloggers and RSS?

Dean Hachamovitch and Robert Scoble?

It’s no secret that Microsoft has been quick to understand that RSS is rapidly becoming a critical technology for timely business communication, and recently announced their plan to fully support RSS at the OS level in Longhorn. In this session, attendees will learn the specifics of the compelling RSS growth numbers and the explosive growth of blogs and the blogging community that helped drive Microsoft toward their recent decision. Microsoft will also reveal where the world of blogging and syndicated content is going as they create the largest single platform on which business bloggers will deliver their messages.

Lessons Learned and Best Practices: the GM and Intuit Experience?

Debbie Weil, Paul Rosenfeld and Michael Wiley?

GM and Intuit were two of the first major corporations to jump into blogging, and have logged several person-years of experience in this realm. In this session, Debbie Weil will delve into the realities of their workflow, policy, and content generation experiences to help those new to the game learn what works, what doesn’t, and what traps to avoid. Risk analysis and prevention * Getting the team to contribute * Choosing topics to write about * Minimizing internal filters while maximizing “safe” dialog

Building Traffic: Posting isn’t Enough!?

Robert Scoble, Dave Taylor?

You’ve got a fantastic blog. The design is beautiful, the content rich and relevant. But your stats are showing that only three people have visited since last July. What can you do? In this session, you’ll learn some of the best ways to build blog traffic quickly, increase interest in you and your product or service, and improve your bottom-line results. * The pros and cons of comment systems * How to use Trackback and Pingback to rapidly extend your blog’s reach * How content aggregation technologies can quickly get your blog content to a wider audience * How to improve blog ranking with both standard and blog-specific search engines * Tips and tricks to keep your visitors coming back for more.

Staying On Top of the Buzz: Blog Monitoring Tools and Techniques?

Jay Stockwell, Evelyn Rodriguez, and Bob Wyman?

What tools and techniques are best for finding out what’s being said about you or your company? This session covers Web hosted services along with desktop applications that automate the gathering and analysis of blog, discussion group, and search engine content. See how to get the latest info without flipping through hundreds of sites or wading through too many feeds. * The best RSS feedreaders * Turning google searches into RSS feeds * Scraping utilities that convert static sites to RSS

Good Blog Design: Speed, Accessibility, Transparency, and Clarity?

DL Byron?

Good content is a requirement, but there’s a lot more to a good blog than just the posts. Standard templates are fine, but there are a myriad of reasons why you’ll want to customize and enhance with a unique layout. Proper blog design can insure your branding, position, and message are optimally projected. Beautiful, cross-device, navigable, and fast loading sites that search engines love are a must. This session will cover what top bloggers do to get the best of all possible worlds.

Picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared?

Molly Holzschlag and DL Byron?

There’s more to a Blog engine than just price. Once you’ve made your choice, transitioning can be a challenge?so you’ll want to pick the optimal platform. If you have chosen, it’s not too late to move to a more robust environment. This session will cover all the major issues in selecting and migrating to the best system. Molly and Byron will cover: * Insuring scalability * Spam prevention * Workgroup options * Feature sets * Pinging, publicity, and broadcast features * Extendability, plug-ins and upgrades * Being ?orphaned?, and how to prevent it.

Corporate Blogging: Strategy and Policy?

Matthew Oliphant, Biz Stone?

Before you flip the switch and encourage employees to blog about the business, it’s critical that you set the stage for responsible posting. Resolving ownership issues. It’s equally important as an employee writing about your employer to be aware of potential ?land mine? issues that could affect your job security. This panel of experts will cover the most critical policy areas, and how to deal with them. * Integrating blogs and confidentiality agreements * Accuracy mandates * Do disclaimers help? * SEC and ?quiet period? restrictions. * Reconciling personal opinions against implied corporate representation * Competitor linking and dialog?how open do you want to be? * Screening and editing posts.

Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies?

Robert Scoble, Janet Johnson?

PR professionals worldwide are learning (sometimes the hard way) that bloggers are a serious force to be reckoned with, and essential to have on your side. Organizations like Dr. Pepper, Kryptonite, and CBS News tried to ignore the negative messages being put forth by bloggers and discovered that proper action was mandatory. In this session, the best leverage and damage control techniques will be revealed. * How to get the bloggers to deliver the right positive message(s) * Prioritizing the bloggers * The power of linking to your critics * Saying you’re sorry?what the Lawyers don’t know.

Buzz Marketing: Using Blogs, Forums, Conversations and Community to Build Brands and Traffic?

John Cass, Buzz Bruggeman?

?A recent U.S. study found that two-thirds of all consumer goods sales are now directly influenced by word-of-mouth, and the Web is becoming more and more central to these discussions. As many organizations have learned the hard way, a good product and happy customers isn’t enough–you’ve got to fuel the fire. This session will feature real-word campaign success stories where tapping into online communities and enhancing discussion yielded impressive results. Targeting the right influencers * How much can you really “manage” word-of-mouth? * Shortcuts for mining discussion groups and customer blogs * Can you manufacture “coolness”? * How do secrecy and exclusivity fit in?

When Worlds Collide: Traditional Public Relations and the Blogosphere?

Steve Broback, Lynann Bradbury, Laurie Mayers, and Rick Murray?

Blogosphere mavens are predicting the end to PR as we know it. It’s claimed the openness of social networking technologies will mean death to centrally controlled corporate messages, and the firms that manage them. In this session, we’ll learn how PR professionals are transitioning into the new world of blogs and plan to thrive, not just survive in this brave new world. Along the way, attendees will learn practical techniques and strategies for promoting their ventures. Why “old” media is far from dead * How “Public Relations” can mean “Blogger Relations”

Blog Writing Style: Strategy and Tactics for Successful Posting?

Molly Holzschlag, Darren Barefoot?

Successful bloggers know that developing a writing style that connects directly with their targeted audience is essential. There’s also a science to making sure that search engines like your headlines, and drive traffic. This session will help you get more readers, and refine your writing to engage in a richer dialog with your community of readers. * First read, then write: being engaged in dialog * Write about what you care about: be passionate * Why not to use Journalistic style * Blog entry archetypes: what are the different kinds of entries, and what are they good for?

Blogs That Sell: Creating Content That Drives Conversion?

Buzz Bruggeman?

It’s one thing to get attention and traffic, but it’s another thing entirely to get those visitors to actually buy. Experts know there are a variety of content, layout, and design approaches that will help turn browsers into buyers. This session will show how to make your site “sticky”. Making each click count * Maximizing traffic from search engines vs. ads. * Essential usability enhancements * Leveraging online product demos and samples * Commerce engines: what ones work best?

Measuring Success: Setting Goals and Establishing Metrics?

Anil Dash, Sally Falkow?

Whether you’re sponsoring a Blog for advertising/branding purposes or are blogging yourself, you’ll need to know if you are succeeding with your efforts. With syndicated feeds, the standard methods of reading visitors and impressions goes out the window–how can you determine your actual audience size? In this session you’ll learn: Buzz measurement tools * How frequency of posting affects traffic * Do “hits” matter anymore? * Measuring inbound links * Using feedburner stats * Blogroll links, Pagerank, and combination measurement systems * Coming measurement services

Incorporating HTML and RSS Ads Into Your Content?

Dave Taylor?

There are lots of options for people seeking to turn their weblogs into profit centers, rather than cost centers, but which work? Which are consistent with the message you seek to convey from your site? This critical session for anyone seeking to become a professional blogger or monetize their weblog traffic will cover: Pros and cons of advertising on your site * How do you want visitors to leave your blog? * Ad placement secrets for maximum click-through * Different types of advertising networks

Building a Blog Network?

Stowe Boyd, Paul Scrivens, Shawn Gold

Corporations and entrepreneurs alike are have embraced the notion of maintaining multiple blogs under one umbrella brand. Whether you are after advertising/sponsorship revenues, trying to sell direct, or just wanting to drive traffic to your central site–this session will answer the pressing questions. What business models work * What platforms work best * Recruiting the right writers and sites * Customers as bloggers * Maximizing income from advertising and sponsorships

More information on this event can be found at www.blogbusinesssummit.com/

Google has recently filed yet another patent, this time for embedding their ads into RSS feeds. The abstract is below:

Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner is described. Syndicated material e.g., corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server is used to provide keyword or content based targeted ads. The ads are incorporated directly into a syndicated feed, e.g., with individual ads becoming items within a particular channel of the feed. The resulting syndicated feed including targeted ads is supplied to the end user, e.g., as a set of search results or as a requested web log. Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing. The automated targeting and insertion process allows ads to be kept current and timely while the original feed may be considerably older.

What does this mean to you? As a website owner it’s one more way to generate revenue from your websites. This move will be a big factor in making RSS more common among non-technical people and when this happens you can expect to see an increase in the effectiveness of your own RSS feeds.

Technorati was tracking some 14.2 million blogs at the end of July, up from 7.8 million in March. That puts the grow at one new blog every second. The fastest-growing blogging services are MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals. The use of software such as Word Press, b2Evolution and Moveable Type to set up blogs also continued to grow significantly.

If your business has a website, most likely it’s constantly changing and evolving. This can be a good thing but how you handle these changes can make a dramatic difference in how effective your website becomes.

Some of your content may be time sensitive, such as information on special promotions, contests and things of that nature. Some content may no longer be relevant to your business, such as discontinued products or services. Most people’s first course of action in these cases would be to simply remove these pages and all internal links (links from your own website pointing to your own pages) so that there is no path to them. This is not the best approach and can result in less website traffic and also potentially affect your search engine rankings.

There is a strong possibility that other people have placed links on their website pointing to the removed pages. Some people may have even previously book marked the removed pages for future use. Once you’ve removed the pages you have eliminated these sources of prospects.

Search engines follow links to find websites and web pages. By removing these pages, you are removing the content that they have come to expect (once they’ve found and indexed it). If they are unable to find a number of pages that you have improperly removed from your server then they very often will leave your website. This can make getting your new pages indexed difficult and slow.

Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple. If you plan to remove a page from your website you would first set up a 301 redirect to another related page. For example if you had a page named “july-sale.htm” and it is now August, you would set your 301 redirect to automatically send all requests for that page directly to “august-sales.htm” instead. Once that is in place you can safely delete the page. If you’ve already deleted pages from your website without setting up 301 redirects you can still fix the problem. If you view your error logs on your web server you can find all of the 404 errors which are caused by requests for files that do not exist and then set up a 301 redirect for each missing file.

This ensures that when someone comes to a page that no longer exists, rather than getting an error message and leaving, they are instantly whisked away to the next most relevant page and you get the chance to turn them into a client or customer. It also ensures that when the search engines come looking for a page that no longer exists they are redirected to the next most relevant page causing them to spend more time crawling your website. It’s important to point out that some hosts do not offer the ability to set up these types of redirects and will recommend adding a java script to the page. This will not work for the search engines because they do not execute any scripts, and it will only work for a portion of visitors.

One of the things that stop many small business owners or managers from starting to advertise is that they feel that they can’t commit to running the ad that they would like to run on a regular basis. This idea is both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.

Let’s look at the good side for a minute. This school of thought is good because it keeps the business owner or manager from investing in a large ad and then stopping because they didn’t see results right away. Usually when that happens they are left with the impression that advertising doesn’t work and then refuse to try it again. The most effective approach is to start with a smaller ad that you can commit to run at least twice a month, then as it delivers results you can increase the size, add color, or both. Remember, people are bombarded each day with numerous advertising messages so you should usually not expect to see measurable results until you’ve run your ad a few times.