Hey, your copy of this 15-page guide is FREE when you subscribe to my e-newsletter, WordBiz Report. Here’s what online copywriting guru Nick Usborne says about the guide:
“It’s a brief and useful introduction for those who are about to start a business blog, and for those who have been blogging for a while, but have lost track of what they first set out to achieve, and why.”
Run don’t walk to Nick Usborne’s Excess Voice site to grab your free copy of his new e-book, Writing for the Web: 7 Challenges Every Writer and Copywriter Faces.
It’s 35 pages and nicely illustrated with screenshots. And of course written in Nick’s inimitable style. I like Challenge #2 — How to write for a site’s three audiences: the company behind the site, visitors to the site… and search engines. A great read and a keeper.
Been collecting these for a week or so.
Ran across this nifty page on Robert’s Echo blog. Includes everything from the "origin" of blogs, stats on blog readership, recommended PR blogs, link to a Forrester Research executive summary, lists of internal and external corporate blogs and more.
Another page with all things blog (including links to RSS tutorials and basic blog definitions) penned by the Singapore-based Rambling Librarian.
Comprehensive list from Dave Taylor’s Intuitive Life blog with links to other articles.
- 101 writing tips from Kari Chisholm on writing a thought leadership blog. (He writes a grassroots advocacy blog.)
Hurry on over to DoubleClick’s (free) knowledge center. If you haven’t already seen it, you can download the Q4 2004 Email Trend Report released in March 2005. Highlight: the average open rate for HTML emails continues to decline. It’s now 32.6%.
In addition, DoubleClick’s director of research Rick Bruner (he also runs BusinessBlogConsulting.com) has just published a new 22-page report: The Decade in Online Advertising: 1994 - 2004. Rick has posted his favorite chart from the report here. It’s a trip through history, starting with Mosaic in 1993 and a flatline for number of Internet users and dollars of Internet ad revenue. By the end of 2004, Internet ad revenues were $9.6 billion and number of U.S. Internet users was about 170 million. Most notable stat: no medium since B&W television has penetrated U.S. households as fast as the Internet. It took only 8 years. Compared with 9 years for radio, 10 for the VCR, 17 for personal computers, 39 for cable TV and 70 for the telephone. I.e. the Internet was virtally unheard of just over a decade ago. (There’s also a good section with blog stats.) Hey Rick, a great report! Looks like your day job suits you.
Tom Peters has nailed it when it comes to selling his value/expertise with FREE stuff. Poke around his Web site (it’s built on blog software) and you’ll be amazed at how much content is free. It’s awfully clever if you think about it. Peters is making the big bucks through his consulting and speaking gigs. By freely distributing PowerPoint presentations, PDFs and Word docs he’s doing cost-free viral marketing. For example:
- Download all of Tom Peters’ slide presentations (going back to 1999)
- Download a 187-page Word doc containing all his blog posts from July, 2004 through January, 2005 (look in the right-hand column where it says “Download files FREE!!!”
- Download his Re-imagine Manifesto (12-page PDF)
Here’s the kicker… For those who want even more, he’s bundled his slides with his speaker notes and you can download them for a small fee ($5). Visit his Wow! store.
Surprisingly not-out-of-date is James Horton’s 9-page PDF, “Marketing and Blogs: What Works” (apparently written in 2003). Download it free here. Among his key points… There are three ways to approach blogs as a marketing strategy: “Write a blog yourself, market through bloggers or advertise on blogs.”
I decided to cover the Jan 24 - 25 conference in Seattle in my other blog, BlogWrite. You can read about it here and here and here. It was a great event. And a kick to get to meet and chat with Microsoft’s “chief blogger” Robert Scoble. In addition, visit Blog Business Summit and look at the blogs listed in the right-hand column. Lots of good reporting summarizing the speakers’ presentations. You can also download the speaker slides & PDFs here. (Scroll down to Session Topics.)
MarketingSherpa just released their annual “Wisdom Report.” It’s a 46-page PDF and a free download. Good section on pages 33 - 35 on PR & blogging. B.L. Ochman writes about how blogs have an almost magical ability to get high search engine rankings (unpaid).
My quick guide to the “what, why & how of business blogging” went live moments ago on Seth Godin’s ChangeThis site. Download my “Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging” as one of the new manifestos. It’s FREE… until Jan. 25, 2005 so don’t wait! Download the PDF here. Hope you find it useful. And a special thanks to Seth and Amit and the other clever folks at ChangeThis.
This is a nifty 17-page PDF with tons of stats in it about the current state of email marketing: click-throughs, landing pages, corporate filtering, etc. A great teaser for the complete version of MarketingSherpa’s 2005 Email Marketing Metrics Guide.
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