CT Biz Blogs

Looking at statistics can be fun, especially about a month after you’ve started blogging. “Someone’s reading my blog — Wahoo!”

But what does it all mean? That’s a whole other question.

I’ve written briefly about two things you need to remember when you look at your blog stats:

• spammers leaving comments (or trying to leave comments) are counted as visitors
• people who won’t accept cookies are being counted as new visitors

There are a lot of ways you can get misinformation from stats, and a lot of ways you can misinterpret your stats.

Stats can tell you some things, when you learn how to interpret them. But today I want to talk about a larger issue:

If you’re a small business, blogging for other reasons besides making money on blog ads, the one thing you really want to know, you won’t be able to learn from your stats!

What’s that, you ask?

How is my blog helping my business?

(more…)

Well, two of my favorite blogs were mentioned in USA Today. They have a nice article called Blogs put businesses on Web search map, with many quotes from Small Business Blog of the Day’s Brian Brown, and one of the blogs they feature is J.D. Iles’s Signs Never Sleep, the blog for the Lincoln Sign Company, in New Hampshire.

Sign-maker Joseph Iles, 37, has been blogging for two years at his Lincoln Sign Co. in Lincoln, N.H. And he’s already seen a payoff. Iles attributes $33,000 in sales last year, or about 10% of total revenue, to customers he found through his Signs Never Sleep blog.

“If you can send an e-mail, you can do a blog,” he says. “It’s simple.”

Congratulations, guys!

In the article, Brian gives examples of 4 business blogs, and the reasons why they’re good blogs, and why blogs are good for business.

And when you read the article, don’t forget to follow the links to see the blog examples, and to read the other articles. There’s a great link to a brief how-to on blogging, and a link to USA Today’s Small business blog, Small Business Connection blog, written by Jim Hopkins. It’s full of good posts, including this one on what Suzanne Hetts, co-owner of Animal Behavior Associates in Littleton, Colo is saying about her planned move into blogging.

After days of anticipating and planning to attend, I decided at the last minute not to go to Podcamp Boston. Now I regret that, because it looks to have been one hell of a conference. Rats.

But Podcamp Boston lives on, online. The hard-working folks have been busy uploading podcasts and updating their site.

There’s lots of great audio here, folks, including talk about podcasting equipment, with David Berlind of CNET, and a session with Kevin Marks of Technorati called Bootleg webcasting to instant videoblog - How to bring remote people into live events, and blog the video afterwards.

And I just have to share with you about how cool Bloglines is. I use Bloglines for all my RSS feeds (subscriptions). And when there’s a post with an audio file, they include a little audio player, right in the feed post! This is great for when you just want to check out the audio without downloading a huge file. It’s just gotten that much easier to keep up.

Technorati : PodCamp Boston

Well, the contest is over. We reached the deadline with an underwhelming response. I’m not sure why the lack of response but I have a few guesses:

1. Maybe I have no readers. My stats say differently, but stats have been known to lie.
2. Maybe my readers are either scaredy-cats or already fearless about blogging.
3. Maybe you can’t even give Huffington’s book away. (OK, cheap shot. More likely: there are still books available at Huffington’s virtual book tour.)

My best guess is, as this is a blog about blogging for small businesses, a non-business book just wasn’t a good fit. I have mixed feelings about the book, myself, but this is not the venue for a book report. I’ll give the books to a few people I have in mind, instead.

In any case, we had one winner, but overall, the contest just didn’t work. Let’s all move along. Nothing to see here.;-)

Update 9/4/06: edited for clarity.