Yesterday we attended the Blogging4business conference in London. It was very ably put together by Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner of Custom Communications - two journalists who have put together training packages and strategies for communications professionals moving into blogging.

With this in mind, we designed a one pager Your 3-step guide to the blogosphere, (PDF download 70k) which we distributed at the conference. The HTML version follows …

1. Get started:

- Go to Technorati, the biggest of the blog search engines.
- Enter the topic you are interested in.
- When you find a blog that appeals to you, you can use Google desktop (a quick download) to automatically notify you when there is new content.
- Or save your search as a Watchlist, and get relevant information from a variety of sources.

Blogs to explore:

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things A lively commentary on events, the world’s most popular blog has 66,000 links from 22,000 sites.
Engadget Well-written technology reviews.
Dooce Personal blog by Heather Armstrong, who got sacked for blogging about her work colleagues
Public Relations Onlinefor discussing how businesses can best understand and use consumer generated content
British businesses using blogs:

The Guinness blog - bought to you by the Guinness branding team
The Cadbury’s Creme Egg podcast - with Kate Thornton
The Honda blog launched 28th February 2006, already has 107 links according to Yahoo

2. Join in

- Go to Blogger to create a blog for yourself. It takes about three minutes and is as simple as setting up a Hotmail account. Your blog will have the format http://yourname.blogspot.com.
- If you want to set something up with your own domain name for business, talk to a blog creation specialist like Market Sentinel.
- If you would like to comment on someone else’s blog posting, click on comment and complete the form. Sometimes (in Blogger and Moveable Type) you have to register in order to comment – this is to protect bloggers against spam comments from advertisers.
- You can comment on a blog posting on your own blog and put the address (http:// …) of the original comment into the “trackback” section of your blogging software. This will mean that your blog post is automatically linked to the blog you are commenting on. This facility has been abused by spammers, so most bloggers check trackbacks to prevent spam.

3. Get your blog noticed

- Optimise your blog for the subject matter. If your blog is about skincare, then put the word “skincare” into the name of the blog, and into the url: www.skincare.co.uk
- Update your blog regularly, at least once a week and ideally two or three times. Search engines visit sites according to how often they find new content.
- Tag your content. When you make a post, use the “category” or “tagging” facility to tell everyone what it is about. Someone on Technorati will be searching on the tag “dry skin”.
- Use Technorati or Google blog search to find out who else is writing about your subject matter. When you make an interesting new post, politely email them with the url and suggest that they might be interested in reading what you have written. You will make some new friends, and you might benefit from some links!
- If you are hosting your site, make you “ping” all the right ping servers when it is updated.

Market Sentinel works with top brands like Yahoo! Europe monitoring blogs and advising on marketing response.

For more information on how to integrate blog communications intoyour marketing strategy, call +44 (0) 20 7793 1575 or mail simon DOT rogers AT new DOT com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 3:04 am and is filed under web monitoring, Blog monitoring, Reputation management, Blogging, Events, Market Sentinel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.