Listed in Top 25 SOBCon Influential Blogs

Once again, the challenge of distance has meant that the SOBCon business school for bloggers event, in Chicago, has come and gone without Thinking Home Business being in attendance. 

So it was a particularly agreeable surprise today to see that Thinking Home Business had been included in Buzz Logic’s Top 25 Influential SOBs, ”the bloggers who are most influential on the topic of the SOBCon conference”.

The BuzzLogic post on the subject explains how the list is determined.

BuzzLogic’s influence algorithm takes a dozen factors into account when determining the influence of posts and a blog overall – a blogger’s credibility and expertise on a specific topic over time, who is linking in, the quality and influence of all in-linkers and the popularity of a post overall.

The list as provided by BuzzLogic is of the URLs (site links). This morning I’ve spent some time (actually a lot of time) visiting each of the blogs so as to add some details here.

I thought that would be a pretty quick list to put together. I didn’t factor in my curiosity! Actually, the process has blown my Friday morning agenda clear out of the water. There is so much interesting, informative and entertaining material in the blogs listed here (the other ones anyway ) that I dare you not to lose an hour or two yourself once you dive in. But I can assure that if you do you will be better informed.

And I’m betting you’ll have have acquired a fresh bunch of RSS feeds if you don’t have all of these already.

It was so obvious to me that the people listed here care about what they write and care about how useful, informative and entertaining it is for their readers. To use an old Australian expression, I “dips me lid” to my colleagues in this list (translation: my hat’s off).

Here’s the list, with a note by me on each of the bloggers and their blogs.

Liz Strauss (Ms Successful Blog Herself), appropriately at Number 1

Lorelle Van Fossen of the legendary Lorelle on WordPress - is there anything she does not know about WordPress?

Phil (”Everywhere Man”) Gerbyshak 0f Make It Great!

Dr Ellen Weber of Brain Based Business

David Armano of the always informative and regularly challenging Logic+Emotion 

Apparently (from a quick search of SOBCon tagged posts on the site) Lorelle Van Fossen again at Blog Herald

The always wise and insightful James D. Walton at Black in Business

Chief Accomplishment Officer Timothy L. Johnson at Carpe Factum (”Seize the Accomplishment”)

Travel, drag racing and naval warfare expert Sheila Scarborough at the BootsnAll Travel Blogs and Logues

Entrepreneur, startup guy, super energetic Ben Yoskovitz at Instigator Blog

Practical, one man hype-free zone, Joe Hauckes at Working at Home on the Internet

Entrepreneur Tim Draayer who shares his business and personal growth journey at Network Marketing Journey (formerly Live Your Best Life)

Yours truly here at Thinking Home Business

Prolific blogger and business growth advisor Dawud Miracle at dawudmiracle.com

Jon G., a “thirtysomething technology marketing type”, at spatially relevant

Branding and marketing expert, in-demand speaker and presenter, Drew McLennan at Drew’smarketingminute

Some one or several at the Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog

Executive coach and passionate catalyst for growth, Kent Blumberg

Poet, writer and teacher Geoffrey Philp from Jamaica, at Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot

Multi-skilled, global traveller Robert Hruzek on lessons learned from life, at Middle Zone Musings

Songwriter, performer, super encourager of others, Christine Kane

English Literature teacher, writer, photographer, Scot, Amy Palko, living the theme of her Lives Less Ordinary

What can I say? The Problogger Hisself, the inimitable Darren Rowse, at Problogger

Marketing Troubleshooter, Mary Schmidt

“Intuitive purpose finder and meaning maker”, creator of hand-crafted websites, Adam Kayce, Monk at Work

Visit them. You will not be disappointed.

Many thanks to BuzzLogic for the list.

Thinking About Blog Monetization

Photo courtesy noahwesley, via flickr, under a Creative Commons licence

Reading Caroline Middlebrook’s post asking whether one’s blog monetization “left money on the table” reminded me that I had once posted something here on the topic.I had, but longer ago than I had thought, almost two years ago. I was interested to see that my views on the topic had not changed fundamentally. In the post, Business Blogs - Show Me the Money, I wrote:

Essentially, my view on the monetizing issue is that a blog can serve a perfectly useful and even productive function in a business by helping raise awareness of the business, helping to build trust and providing other benefits, none of which need to be directly attributable to this or that sale of goods or services on or directly from the blog.

Which is not to say people shouldn’t make money directly from their blogs. Some do - and some of them do very well indeed. No problem with that. Just don’t want to see an equation being developed that “good business blog” = “directly monetized”.

I’ve never been opposed to the idea of having ads on this site generating income. But I am very clear that my blogging, which for a long time was mainly on this site, has played a significant role in generating income for me in the past few years. Just not directly from the blog. More about branding and reputation management.

But as a business owner I want to make sure I don’t get stuck in a paradigm that may be narrower than it needs to be. I’m open to ideas about generating income directly from the site, provided that does not detract from its purpose as a provider of information and promoter of thinking about “working from home in a networked world”.

So I read Caroline’s post with great interest. It includes some valuable information and commentary about:

• Google Adsense ads
• other ways of generating income from your site
• the dollar value you put on ads on your site (some serious food for thought here)
• the importance of building relationships - “building beyond the blog itself”.

For this Thinking Home Business blog, a step in the direction of being a bit more attentive to not “leaving money on the table” has been introducing the 125×125 pixel ads in the sidebar. My feeling is that they are not obtrusive and do not detract from the post content, but are hopefully evident enough to attract some clickthroughs, from that some happy customers for whatever products are being advertised and in turn some revenue directly from this site.

I’d love to hear from readers who have views about this topic, whether for or against generating income (a phrase I prefer to the dreaded “monetization”) from our blogs: comments of the undecided welcome also.

Wordless Wednesday: When Twitter is Not Enough

“When Twitter is Not Enough”: Photo Copyright Suzie Cheel 2008

Join us at Wordless Wednesday.

5 Minutes to Write a Valuable Blog Post?

The timer is on.

Start: 6.30 am
Can I meet the challenge that Wendy Piersall has just posted?

Wendy is at SOBCon, and Chris Garrett has put a challenge out to SobCon attendees to write a 5 minute blog post that actually creates value.

So can how could I do this?

A few ideas:

• Blog from your reader, a tip that has helped someone else, that can help your readers.
• Have a regular topic, like my From the Cards that could be done in 5 minutes, although I find the card usually inspires a longer post. Help do I have time to find an image. NO!

Finish 6.35 am

Do you think this is a valuable post? What can you do to add value in 5 minutes

PS. If I could touch type it would be easier:)