7 tips from B2B blogger Dave Shaw Author of B or not 2B blog provides random thoughts on technology, writing, publishing

David Shaw, as senior vice president for Phillips Business Information, oversaw nearly 100 media properties.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series about B-to-B blogging. Because the very substance of B-to-B publishing is public, written expression, one might think a large number of blogs would be devoted to it. Wrong. Only a handful of people blog about B-to-B media including David Shaw, whose blog is entitled “B or not 2B — A Business Media Blog.” At left is a Q&A with Martha Spizziri, vice president of ASBPE’s Boston chapter, who writes the Boston chapter blog.

Why do you blog about B-to-B
publishing?

It’s what I do for a living, and I spend a good deal of my time thinking about the short- and long-term challenges we face. I had a hand in launching min’s B2B, and have always wanted more B-to-B media news and information readily available.

Also, a folder I keep of relevant B-to-B media-related articles was overflowing, and contained the first drafts of several essays I had written over the years, so I thought I’d put them onto my Web site. And finally, I wanted to experiment with blogging before launching blogs for
my customers.

What do you hope it will accomplish for the industry? Do you have any pet issues?

I hope to contribute in some small way to the future health of our business. I think B-to-B media is as innovative as the porn business when it comes to early adoption of new technologies, because like the porn business, we have to be innovative to survive. I’ve been in B-to-B media for 25 years, and every year I’ve had to answer hard questions about the value of trade advertising and trade editorial. We’re constantly being questioned by advertisers on why they should bother supporting us.

So I try to highlight a few things: the technological development of e-paper, digital editions of magazines, selling integrated media programs, the commoditization of news, paid versus free business models … the list goes on.

Do comments and e-mails tend to be from the same core group of people?

Comments do tend to come from a small group of fellow bloggers and regular readers. Part of this may be the silly way I set up commenting in Blogger (the free blog software I use). You have to click through to “read the whole post,” then scroll down to find the comment area. Given this barrier, I’m surprised I get any comments.

But each month, new commentators show up. Surprisingly, many of them comment on posts that are weeks or months old, which indicates to me that new readers go through large chunks of the blog when they first encounter it. I recently added a Google search bar to the blog to help readers find older content more easily.

Do you know how many people are reading your blog?

I’ve tried! But the data I have is so variable. The key indicators I use are my Web site stats, which show the following:

Before launching the blog early in 2005, I averaged about 600 visitors a month to my very static Web site. Each month since, that traffic has grown, and I had 12,420 visitors in November 2005, averaging 410 visitors a day. Search engine bots are a part of that traffic, but so are page views of my atom.xml RSS feed [for the blog].

I’m guessing that a lot of people are grabbing the feed into their newsreaders, but that’s just a guess, based on the stats I have. I have a few subscribers who use various feed services. Bloglines, for example, shows 16 subscribers to my feed. I track and read blogs using My Yahoo, but don’t know how to track others who might use the same tool.

And I use MyBlogLog, a service that helps me track clickthroughs on my blog entries. According to MyBlogLog, my blog averages about 70 readers a day. But that’s just activity to the Web site, not readers of the RSS feed.

So in the end, I don’t know exactly how many people are reading my blog. But the number seems to be growing each month, as evidenced by ever-increasing comments to my blog posts and increasing e-mails.

And I can say with great certainty that a decent blog will increase traffic and readership. We’ve launched a blog for one of my clients, and watched daily traffic increase by 33% in the first month, and our (Google) Adsense revenues increase by 100% in the same period.

Has the blog helped your business?

Has the blog brought me new clients? No. Has it helped broaden my contacts within B-to-B media? Yes. Has it helped sharpen my thinking on B-to-B media, which theoretically will benefit my clients? Yes. It’s this latter point that’s most important to me. I don’t blog to generate business, which I hope will translate into profitable ideas for the media companies we manage.

Has your blog changed over time?

I’m sure it has. I’ve tried to shorten my posts somewhat. And I’ve tried to broaden the scope of what I blog, since I think what’s happening to other media is instructive to the challenges we in B-to-B media face.

What advice do you have for bloggers?

First, start a blog and join the conversation, if you’re in B-to-B media and have insights and ideas about B-to-B media. There are only a few B-to-B media-specific blogs out there, and I’d like to see more. You’ll find a lot of support in our tiny blog community. Perhaps we’ll all band together and aggregate our feeds some day, and become rich, I tell you, rich!

Second, if your publication or trade show doesn’t have a blog, launch one, and now. Conversational media has tremendous value in audience-building, and in creating added content value for that audience. If your media property doesn’t have a “voice,” you’re already in trouble. A blog can help build that voice.

Third, the best way to launch a blog is to create your first post. Be adaptable. And set times that you’ll post — it doesn’t take all that long, if you’re organized. There are a lot of reasons to avoid blogging. It’s too raw. It can open you to criticism and advertiser backlash. It takes too much time. Ignore these.

Fourth, post every day if you can. I notice my site traffic dips on the days I don’t post. If I post consistently, traffic builds each day. If I don’t post for a day or two, it takes time to rebuild that traffic to its former level. A lot of bloggers post only a few times a week, or a month. That approach just doesn’t work, in my opinion.

Fifth, post honestly. If you have something to say, say it. Reveal potential conflicts of interest. If you have a bias, note it, and revel in it.

Sixth, post literately. Nothing bothers me more than half-thought-out posts filled with grammatical errors. We’re writing here, folks, even if blogging is a form of conversational media. And if we’re writing about media, we have an even greater responsibility to use logic and the language correctly.

Seventh, read a lot of blogs. There are as many different styles and approaches as there are bloggers. And bloggers — at least the ones I follow — bring unique perspectives and analysis, which helps make my blog better and more to the point, in my humble opinion.

Do you spend time each day specifically researching items for the blog?

I don’t specifically research items for the blog, but do keep track of items of interest either in a paper file, or by using the “blog this” feature on Blogger. I’ll review the file and “blog this” items, and select those that are most relevant. I usually review those items a couple of times a week. Certainly since starting the blog, I review my information sources more regularly and closely, and keep more notes than I used to. A blog can be a tough taskmaster!

What are your pet peeves about blogs?

I really hate to see gratuitous smack downs and attack posts.