How to Research the Best Business Blogs
4 Easy Steps to Find Effective Web Examples of Business Blogging
In a recent Hubspot webinar, Marketing Vice-President Mike Volpe explained that business blogging is an essential core component of inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is a powerful new trend in which hundreds of thousands of companies and entrepreneurs around the world use blogs, search engine traffic and social media sites including Facebook and YouTube as tools that entice prospective clients to visit their sites.
The biggest challenge is the vast amount of information available via the Internet. By 2010, IBM projects that the amount of online information will double every 11 hours.
Below are 4 steps to help online users to find and then selectively manage information from the most successful and effective business blogs.
1. Choosing an RSS Reader to Aggregate Business Blogs
At the bottom right of this article is a link named ‘How to subscribe to feeds’. That link accesses information on how to create a central news reader that will aggregate and display Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from useful business blogs in one place. Among thousands of available RSS news readers, the Google Reader is both easy to use and free.
Users go to the Google Reader site and, if necessary, create a free Google account. After entering the appropriate user ID and password, visitors can watch an online video on getting started with Google Reader.
Experts like Mike Volpe recommend setting an RSS Reader as the default home page. Users can then quickly scan updated RSS-fed business blog summaries each time they call up their Internet browsers.
2. Finding the Best Business Blogs
Leading Internet marketing companies make their revenues mentoring and training other businesses on how to blog effectively for business purposes. Hubspot is a business-to-business training enterprise for company business blogging. To date, Hubspot has signed up over 600 customers since launching its inbound marketing business in December 2007.
Since business blogging is a primary service that Hubspot sells to its clients, one might reasonably expect that the online marketer’s own blog would need to be an excellent example of business blogging.
Business blog researchers can use Hubspot's free website grader tool to confirm the marketing effectiveness of websites including blogs. For business blogs in particular, two key success factors are the number of inbound links from other sites and the blog site’s traffic rank.
Website grader shows that Hubspot's blog has over 15,500 incoming links from other websites. Hubspot’s blog also has an online traffic rank among the top 0.43% of all websites for online traffic and is in the top 0.02% on Technocrati, a popular blog directory service.
3. Searching for Keyword-Specific Business Blogs
Often business blog researchers are focused on a specific topic, product, service, place or person. In these cases, finding the most effective business blog sites requires users to first think of the keyword phrase that best matches what they need to know from the blogosphere.
For example, researchers interested in business blogs that discuss the new Web browser Google Chrome can go to Google Blog Search and type the keywords “Google Chrome” between double quotation marks. Clicking on the Search Blogs button results in a list of pertinent blogs including The Chrome Blog and The Chrome Voice.
Website grader found that The Chrome Blog has 11,434 inbound links, an Alexa web traffic rank among the top 12.34% of all websites but with no Technocrati ranking. The Chrome Voice has only 53 inbound links and therefore may have less credibility as a business blog, even though it’s ranked in the top 12.04% of all websites for online traffic.
Just as importantly, users should ensure that business blog articles are recent, of high-quality and with a history showing at least 2 to 3 updated articles posted weekly.
4. Adding Feeds from Selected Business Blogs to an RSS Reader
Once a business blog researcher has carefully selected one or more credible business blogs, it’s time to set up regular information feeds to the user’s RSS Reader.
At the source blog site from which the RSS feed will come, users must click on the Subscribe to RSS Feeder link which is typically beside an orange icon. This opens the blog’s RSS feeder page. Users select and copy the feeder page’s URL from the browser’s address line into memory.
After returning to an RSS Reader like Google Reader, the next action is to click on the Add Subscription button midway down the left panel on the screen. An entry box pops up, into which users paste the feeder page URL from memory and then click the Add button. Blog articles from the source RSS feeder site then appear in the RSS reader panel.
Google Reader also has a list view to easily browse many blog titles, plus a manage subscriptions link that enables users to organize blog articles into folders.
Profitable Business Blogging
Using these simple but highly professional techniques, online researchers can stay on top of the most recent developments among the best business blogs on the Web.
