A couple of days ago I suggested there was a need for a conference focused on business blogging. Well, Shazaam!, it turns out there's one already on the books!

According to a post from Dana VanDen Heuvel, the American Marketing Association is going to have a 3 stop tour on blogging and internet marketing. The topic at hand: Incorporating Blogs Into Your Strategic Marketing Plan.

The one-day conference road show will start in Seattle in December, then hit New York and Chicago in early 2005.

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A picture does paint a thousand words, so it's nice to add images to blog posts to give them more eye appeal and help sell the message. But stock photos from places like Getty Images or Corbis can cost an arm and a leg. Even low-resolution photos can end up costing hundreds of dollars.

There is now an alternative: istockphoto.com, an online stock photo service that enables you to buy images for just $1.50 or less. And these aren't cheesy looking images either, but professional quality. Their catalog of over 115,000 images is surprisingly good, and includes low-resolution photographs for Web use as well as high-resolution images for print applications.

I got a note from Jay Valanju at Pluck in response to a question I asked him about whether they were going to attempt to create a version for Mozilla's browser Firefox. Here's what he said. . .

We're actively looking into migrating to Mozilla based browsers. It looks like many of our users would rather use Firefox instead of IE so you're dead on about Firefox. One option that we just rolled out is Pluck Web Access, which you can click to from a button on the top right of our home page. It's a web based version of Pluck that will have most of the features of the client app but can run on Firefox!

As you may know, I'm a real fan of Pluck. It helps me research and organize the web in a way no other tool I've used has. It's only limitation is that it works by integrating with Internet Explorer. I am joining the ranks of those who are migrating away from IE in favor of Firefox, so I'm glad Jay and Dave (Dave Panos, the CEO) are willing to bite the bullet on this.

I had a dream the other night that some programming genius came up with a publishing application that created content for a weblog AND an email newsletter all-in-one! In other words, inside one app, content could be easily repurposed so that there was no need for re-entering it. You post to your blog and, within the bowels of the app, that content could easily be morphed into a format suitable for email.

If anyone knows of such a tool, please let me know. I've said that, for the time being, the ideal marketing communications mix is a combination of blogs and email, with RSS thrown in for good measure. Those are the areas I'm emphasizing now, and I'd like to know if such an application exists. If it doesn't, why is someone is not working on creating it? If someone did, I know it would be a hit!

Though I'm not a smoker per se, I've always wondered about the taste of a really fine cigar. One of the readers of this blog, the Cigar Guru, happens to own an online cigar store. Having looked at some of what he offers, I don't think you'll find a nickel cigar there, not even a good one. I mean, these are fine cigars! :-)

He took my advice the other day and added Haloscan comments and trackbacks to his blog, Cigar Smoker's Compendium.

He uses Blogger as his platform and, as you know, it doesn't provide for trackbacks. He posted a comment saying he wasn't sure if it was working, so I told him I'd test it with a trackback to one of his posts. So, that's what this post is essentially, a test. How's that for customer service!

Amy Gahran has done a series of posts on what she sees as seven basic formats for blog postings. Each serves a different purpose for bloggers and their readers. Amy says, "The format of a blog posting, if chosen consciously and carefully, enhances communication."

I guess this post qualifies as the "link-blurb" type. :)

It turns out that, about the same time I wrote the post What is RSS and Why Should I Care?, Debbie Weil, a woman whose insights to both business blogs and email newsletter I highly respect, wrote an article for her ezine Wordbiz called One more time... what is RSS & why should you care?

If that seems more than coincidental to you, I would have to agree. Here's what I surmise:

I really like Blogger.com! Not only was it one of the first (or was it THE first?) blogging platforms available, it is so darn easy to use. Three simple steps, and voila, you have your very own blog! And, it's FREE! It comes with several very attractive templates which can not only be customized to the look and feel of your website if so desired, but can even incorporated into your site!!

One of the few components Blogger does not incorporate natively is trackback technology. TrackBack is a system developed by Movable Type that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a 'ping' between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.

That has been Blogger's "Achille's Heel" where I'm concerned, that kept me from using it myself. However, that little techno-gaffe can now be circumvented by using a trackback plug-in developed by Haloscan.com. And guess what, it's also free!

The best part about the Haloscan plug-in is that it uses a simple two-step process that detects your Blogger blog and installs the trackback function automatically. All you have to do is have your comments turned on and, voila, you have trackbacks!

If you're a small businessperson who is interested in blogging, I can't think of an simpler, more easy-to-use system than Blogger. (And I use TypePad!) It's a great way to get your feet wet at least.

Have you ever sat there working on your blog - researching, writing, editing - then wondered, "Is anyone even reading this stuff?!"

Most blogging software with which I'm familiar doesn't provide great stats tracking. For example, Typepad, the platform I currently use gives woefully inadequate statistics. I've griped about that to them and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Never fear, that's why God made third-party software apps. Sitemeter is a stats tracking plug-in that I use and recommend.

As a web counter Sitemeter meets all my requirements (It's free, fast, and easy to use!). Not only does it display the number of visitors to your blog, it also keeps statistics on the number of visits each hour and every day. It also provides detailed information about these visitors, provided in real time so they are always up-to-date. With Sitemeter you can even estimate traffic predictions for the day, week, or month!

All that's needed to install Sitemeter is just a couple of lines of HTML code added to your template. I installed mine in the left-hand column, so it picks up all the posts. But, you could install it in the footer just as easily. You can choose from a variety of counters too.

If traffic metrics are an important factor (and if you're running a business they should be), I'd suggest using Sitemeter.

FURTHER UPDATE: I just saw a link to a post done by Amy Gahran back in May called What Are Webfeeds (RSS), and Why Should You Care? So, I'm going to suggest that I borrowed the title of my post from hers without realizing it. And, like Debbie's article, what Amy has to say is way better than mine, so read hers first!

UPDATE: Stranger things have happened I guess, but it just so happens that about the same time I wrote this post (It wasn't actually published until several days later.), Debbie Weil wrote an article for her WordBiz enewsletter entitled One more time. . .what is RSS and why should you care? Her's is better than mine, so read it first! :-)

RSS, which you may know by now stands for Really Simple Syndication, is quite simply one of the most important components of your marketing communications mix. If you've wondered what the "little orange button" you've seen on some websites is for, read on.

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