Martin De Saulles

The best business blogs are those that have a personal feel to them where you get to know the person or people behind the posts.  Some good examples that I regularly read are A VC, The Obvious? andBuzzMachine.  I trust the authors of those blogs and feel they believe in what they write.

I'm sure ghost writing services for blogs have been around as long as blogs have existed and no doubt do a lot to help with the SEO of corporate web sites.  However, in the long term I think it will become a zero-sum game as content is created purely to get more Google juice and not to express the thoughts and reflections of the people really running the business.  Emotional connections with an author and, by extension, their company will ultimately have more value than another cynical top ten list of this or that.

There are some very interesting results in the PostRank Blog Awards.  Using a range of metrics this seems to be a fairly robust and comprehensive attempt to rank the influence and popularity of blogs across a wide range of subject areas. For me, the post interesting information in these results is the quantification of the points of engagement for the blogs they have evaluated.  This is presented as either on-site or off-site engagement with a breakdown of the off-site tools used by readers to engage with blog content.  The clear driver of most off-site engagement is Twitter with Delicious generally coming second.  Perhaps more interesting is how this varies with the audience of different blogs.  The winning blog in the Poetry category had 99% on-site engagement while the winner in the Web 2.0 category only had 9% on-site engagement. Not terribly surprising, but it shows the importance of understanding your users when developing a marketing strategy for your blog.