CT Biz Blogs

If you’re a small business, you don’t have a large budget. But you still need things for your business such as books about business, or even office supplies.

If you’re a small business in the continental United States, you might get lucky. InBubbleWrap is giving away free stuff. I’ve already won a book, Radical Careering. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Every weekday is a different contest, and all you need to do is answer some amusing questions to enter.

Here’s a snippet from the site:

iBW is a site dedicated to giving you the opportunity to win FREE business related prizes. Each day (Monday – Friday) brings a new contest with new prizes for you to win. All prizes are business related whether it’s the latest set of business books, nifty office supplies or advice from a business book author.

New offers are launched daily at 9 a.m. (Central Time) and run for 24 hours.

Even though The Soap Blog isn’t a Connecticut blog, it’s an excellent example of what Connecticut business bloggers could be doing, too! This series of posts is also a fascinating look into the creative spirit that anyone with an ounce of creativity can relate to.

Right now, Heather is writing a series of stories about four scents she created to pay tribute to four women who influenced her.

In a previous post, she mentioned that she was working on a scent called “Nora,” and gave some history of how she’s been struggling to come up with just the right “notes” for it. In today’s post, Alma, Elinor, Elsie and Nora, she has some thumbnail photos of the women, and introduces them briefly to us. Heather says:

I used these women who I knew were very different as a platform to shape the fragrance - so as to embody something for everyone - once I had done that, the actual perfume so strongly associated with that woman - I couldn’t concieve of any other name for them - any other image.

She plans to tell us more about them, as perfumes, over the next few posts. I’m intrigued, because I want to see how she works with her materials so that “…their perfumes to reflect the richness and the colour they displayed during their lifetimes - and to be a signature to their personality that any woman, every woman could share.”

I trust that these stories are authentic, because Heather is the voice of Eie Flud, and she’s authentic. She’s become so, to me, because of her blogging. As I’ve been reading her posts, I feel I know her a bit. This is what I call authentic marketing — telling a real story, not only of the women, but of how Heather works, and how passionate and knowledgeable she is about what she does.

As she tells us about the perfumes, I hope she tells us a bit more about the women’s lives, also. Or maybe she’ll blend the two strands into one story, the way she blends her ingredients.

In the last two posts I’ve been talking about how bloggers know if someone is linking to them. To recap: There are 4 main ways:

1. email
2. Trackbacks
3. Blog watches/search engines
4. Referrer logs from stats

Read part 1 and part 2 for full details on items 1-3; today I’m going to talk about referrer logs.

4. Referrer logs

Referrer logs are one type of statistic you can collect about the traffic that comes to your blog. There’s a lot of different types of info you can collect – new vs. returning users (if they’ve accepted a cookie), pages viewed, pages they entered on, pages they left, type of browser (called a user agent in stat-speak). (more…)

In Part 1, I talked about two ways of finding out who’s linking to you; via email, and with trackbacks. Here’s the next installment.

3. Blog watches/search engines.

There are a number of search engines which specialize in searching blogs. The first one was Technorati. Other popular blog searches are: Feedster, Blogpulse, and Icerocket.

With the blog search engines you can search for links to your site, and then (and this is the really cool part) subscribe via RSS to those searches. That way, you’ll see any new links whenever you crank up your blog feed reader. (more…)

The first open house women’s networking event at Jitters Coffeehouse will be happening tonight. The coffeehouse is at 1273 Queen Street in Southington (RT10). This is put on by the Central Ct Women’s Forum group.

The cost is $5 and includes coffee or tea, and desserts. No reservation is required. They will meet twice a month on Wednesday nights — the next meeting is December 7th.

I’d be there tonight if I didn’t already have other plans — I’ve got the Dec 7th event on my calendar, though.

Also, check out their press release for more information on the radio show they’re putting together.

In a recent post about outbound links on the Naked Conversations blog, Shel Israel called links the “wampum” of blogs. (He and co-author Robert Scoble wrote a new book about blogs called Naked Conversations. They blogged the entire process, from finding a publisher, to drafts of the chapters, to notes about the research that went into the book, and much more. I’m saving my pennies for this book.)

I’ve written before about linking to others and why that’s important (part 1, part 2). The flip side of that is that bloggers who are linked to will investigate the reference, check you out, and perhaps link to you if they feel their readers might be interested. But that’s a maybe — it’s not something a blogger is obligated to do. (more…)

I went to a CCWF meeting on Tuesday. This group meets the 3rd Tuesday of every month, at the Aqua Terra restaurant in Southington.

I’ve been to two meetings, as a visitor, and have had a great time on both occasions. This is an energetic group of women with diverse backgrounds and businesses, who all come together to network, and discuss various aspects of being in business.

The food is always excellent, and there’s a lot of energy and excitement in the room. That’s due in no small part to the hard work and efforts of the leadership team, headed by Shirley Bloethe, who owns several businesses, including Jitters Coffeehouse, and Pass it On Sports & Fitness.

At the last meeting we learned about the new focus of WXCT AM 990. They have decided to focus on Women’s issues for their new format, and the CCWF will be a part of that, hosting a weekly program, Tuesdays at 1 PM.

Also, because the group is large and they just don’t get enough opportunities to talk to each other, they are starting an open house women’s networking event at Jitter’s Coffeehouse 1273 Queen Street in Southington RT10. The first meeting is this coming Wednesday, Nov 23rd.

The cost is $5 and includes coffee or tea, and desserts. No reservation required.

You can find contact info at the website of the Central CT Women’s Forum.

Of course, you know they really need a blog!

If you have a blog, you’re created a presence on the web. If you have a presence on the web, you need to have a web-based way to contact you. You need to have an email address and you need to have it findable on the blog.

There are ways to avoid spam — you can have a graphical email link, such as in the upper right hand corner of this blog. I wrote earlier about how to create a graphic for your gmail account (and others), but you don’t need it — any graphics program, such as Paint, will allow you to create an image.

By the way, if you want a gmail account, contact me — I’ve got a bunch of invitations left. If you have a mobile phone, you can go right to Google and get one without an invitation from me.

Blog Flux just came out with a free email “scrambler” which makes it harder for spammers to harvest your email address. You simply type in your email address and click the “scramble email link” button, and you get some code which you copy, and then paste wherever you want your address to appear.

Make it easy for people to contact you; it could lead to great conversations, new business, new alliances, or even save you from a mistake. (If you find a mistake, typo, or whatever on CTBizBlogs, please let me know!)

Here’s a bad example. I recently went to the Business Week website, in search of podcasts. Here’s what I found on their page:

Embarassing. I might be interested in Greek wine; Greek wind conjures up images I won’t share.

I searched for a way to contact the webmaster. Nothing on the site. No page owner, just a link to customer service. There I was requested to fill out a long form. Forget it — this is way too much trouble.

Maybe they’ll read about it here.

In an earlier article I wrote about blogs with multiple authors. There’s one type of multiple-author blog I missed – the customer evangelist blogs at Vespa. This project is headed by Steve Rubel, a VP at CooperKatz & Company, who writes Micro Persuasion, an influential blog about public relations and new media.

Vespa has four people blogging on two officially sanctioned blogs, which are linked to right from the corporate website. These people were approved by Vespa, and given guidelines to follow, but their posts are not screened in any way. (Visit Micro Persuasion link above for the PDF of the blogging guidelines). They are also not getting paid, according to the Vespa blogging FAQ page.

These writers already have their own blogs, and they are already Vespa owners. They are “Customer Evangelists,” (more…)

In the October 23rd issue of Northeast Magazine, a supplement of the Hartford Courant, Joel Lang wrote “Decoding the Blogosphere: Navigating Connecticut’s Expanding World Of Web Logs” (link is to online article).

It’s not an awful article; it does serve as an introduction, of sorts, to blogging. But, as is almost guaranteed in most mainstream media coverage of blogs, it concentrates on the personal journal variety. Apparently, Joel Lang discovered Connecticut Weblogs, talked to the folks behind that effort, and sampled some of the blogs listed on their site, focusing on the more off-beat ones. To be fair, I must say that most of the blogs listed on Connecticut Weblogs are the personal ones, and they are a very quirky lot. (more…)