InfoSphere™ Business Alerts And Intelligence: Blog

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Friday, September 21, 2012

The Best Wealth-Building Blogs

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Increasing disposable personal income (both active and passively, via investments) and accumulating increasing wealth are two of my favorite subjects. Apparently, my esteemed colleagues and visitors at The InfoSphere Business Alerts And Intelligence Blog, I am not alone.

Recently CBS Money sent me a newsletter which cited some of the best wealth-building blogs which "you may never have heard of." I have cursorily reviewed each and all of these blogs (and I actually am a regular reader of two of them!), and wanted to share them with you. I would suggest that you view each of these blogs and that you bookmark or favoritize (a Lingovation) this article in order to keep this mini-collection of blogs at hand, all together in a neat little bundle. They are all well-written, very practical, plainly spoken, and even a bit humorous. Here they are (cue drumroll):

Best frugality blog: The Centsible Life. I tell people that I'm not cheap, I'm "value-oriented." So this is definitely a blog for people like me who want to have it all, but on a budget.
Best investing blog: Oblivious Investor. This blog offers great investment advice for simple low-maintenance investing. The founder, Mike Piper, has written many successful books, and his site is filled with uncommon common-sense investing. I'm biased here, as I know Mike. think he is brilliant and wish I'd had his wisdom when I was his age.
Best tax blog: Joe Taxpayer. This blog covers far more than just taxes and explores many great financial topics. Think of it as financial commentary for the average Joe.
Best retirement blog: Good Financial Cents. This isn't your typical "how to live in retirement" blog. It's about taking charge of your life and reaching financial independence. Personally, I like the phrase "financial independence" far more than retirement.
Best blog for young adults: Studenomics.The founder says, "My goal is to put more money in your pocket. I love to see young people grab life by the... and conquer their money." Now that's a mission statement!
People's choice award: Punch Debt in the Face. The site's slogan is "financial education one laugh at a time," and it delivers common sense advice with a dose of humor. Who says money can't be funny?
Blog of the year: Budgets are Sexy. Practical advice and tools to build wealth.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy the use of these resources. I have found that expert, prolific bloggers are oftimes a far better source of truly useful information than mainstream media, newsletters (which are loaded with advertorial content) and social media, where detail is often lacking but where you may occasionally find a good live link to a quality article on a well-written blog.

Enjoy these with my compliments.

Douglas E. Castle , also author of The Daily Burst Of Brilliance Blog

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Blogging And You - Judgment Day - Part 2

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"Beware Of The Blog" - Click Here For Theme Song...Really.
When you arrive, just scroll down a bit.

Blogging, and the influence of the news and reviews traveling about the blogosphere are, and will continue to be a major force impacting your business. As discussed in Part 1, blogs are powerful media tools for building branding, name-recognition, thought-leadership positioning, credibility and sales. As also noted, if you embark on a blogging campaign that is improperly positioned (or which "smells" even a bit tampered with in terms of informational value and integrity of posts), you stand to be very adversely affected.

My purpose is to provide you with concepts, parameters and actionable items for you to immediately implement in order to either a) productively and profitably harness the incredibly inexpensive but efficient power of blogging, or b) exercise damage control and course correction if you've already started off with a blogging campaign which is headed in a bad direction, or if the blogosphere has already decided to attack you, for whatever reason.

Here, in no particular order of priority, is a "To-Do" (and "Not-To-Do") list to empower your growth and profitability in every aspect with blogging. As they say in the movies, "Follow these instructions to the letter and nobody gets hurt." - Douglas E Castle
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Blogging Campaign Thought Points:

1) If you choose to feature company blogs, they should be of the following types:

Information from a variety of sources about your company's field or industry, and (perhaps) featuring your non-inflammatory comments about them. Publish at least once per week, and give credit to your sources. Make it an unbiased informational resource which is merely sponsored by your company, and not anything remotely advertorial - this paints the picture of thought-leadership, balance, integrity and credibility;
"Behind the Scenes"-type blogs where your employees talk about their experiences with your company through its successes and failures. Filter for profanity, but don't censor it. Permit humor, free expression, and open talk of missteps and bloopers;
News releases and product announcements - but again, no advertisements, and no advertorials;
A "forum"-style blog wherein you invite client and customer reviews, without censorship, without bias-selection, and with your responses -- non-defensive, not knocking the competition or the writer, very polite, apologetic (if appropriate) or grateful (if appropriate) - if you are taking corrective action about a customer or client complaint, say "thank you" and briefly state what you intend to do about it;
Published 'open' surveys and polls about your company, brand, products and services, wherein you use social media to invite candid feedback, and where you publish the results...and add some commentary about how you feel, and what actions (if any) you'd like to take. View all input as constructive. Be gracious. Be kind.

2) Always encourage commentary (feedback from the public, clients, customers, employees, industry pundits, and even competitors) on any of your company's blog sites. Never, ever pay for a product or service review (either good or bad), and do not provide incentives for positively-framed comments or compliments -- you'll lose your credibility;

3) Encourage and invite (via email, social media, newsletters and the like) clients, customers, employees, industry experts, product and service review site owners, etc.) to write about your company, brand, products, services on their own blogs and in their social media postings. Request that they be completely candid, and do not offer incentives except the opportunity for their voices and opinions to be heard.

4) Use Google Alerts or a similar service to find out whenever someone posts a blog article or social media comment about your company. Check these frequently, and write back without combativeness, defensiveness. This is a great means of obtaining constant, useful market feedback for improvement and for reputation management. Be polite and positive. Take the moral high road.

5) Be certain that all of your blogs have RSS feeds and social media sharing and forwarding tools.

If you do it properly, consistently (you may even host a number of blogs relating to specialized subtopics within your industry), frequently, and proactively, your interaction with the blogosphere, and integration with some social media, might be one of your most powerful business development tools.

Having said this, please make no mistake about it: You must proactively engage with the blogosphere and its growingly-reliant citizenry, or you will lose opportunity while others within your space take your territory out from under you. Take action, or be acted upon.

Douglas E Castle [http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com]

http://BusinessAndProjectPlanning.blogspot.com

http://Links4LifeAlerts.com

http://TheInternationalistPage.blogspot.com

http://TheGlobalFuturist.blogspot.com

Please click on the irrelevant picture below in order to see it in larger size and with higher resolution...in this way, you might even be able to read the cleverly-embedded fine print. Actually, there is (remotely) some relevance here -- graphics, visual media (slideshows, videos, etc.), graphs, charts, pictures and photos tend to make your blog posts more interesting, and tend to add to your readers' engagement experience.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Blogging And You - Judgment Day - Part 1

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The trend is growing at an accelerating pace with no sign of abating. Blogging (which started as a means of simply sharing a journal before it became a citizen publishing medium) carries tremendous potential for branding, for thought-leadership, for announcements, for advertising and promotion, for building a bond of interpersonal connectivity with your company's customers, clients or readers. The blogosphere, with the help of search engines and the viral circulation mechanism of social media has truly become perceived as the most credible podium in the court of public opinion. This is not a technologically-oriented blog on tips and tricks - it is an alert about the rise to to prominence of blogging, and how you can harness and focus its fabulous potential with an emphasis on marketing, and with none of the usual blogophilic debate about Google (Blogger) versus WordPress; new plug-ins, widgets and apps; search engine optimization (SEO) or meta-tags.

Of course, blogging, as a practice is a double-edged sword; do it brilliantly and you will win name recognition, credibility, increased business and marketshare, and valuable customer loyalty. Do it improperly, and you stand to lose virtually everything. Either way, you must learn to use this powerful apparatus as a gardening tool or a weapon; you must learn very quickly. As a sponsor or author of blogs, you become a personality (even corporately) with a voice. The tone of that voice, as well as the content being set free to proliferate throughout cyberspace, will be judged.

The information which follows was gleaned from an excellent article written at the beginning of this year by Ms. Autumn Morris, titled "Technorati Predicts Continued Growth Within The Blogosphere For 2011." You can read the article in its entirety after you've finished reading this post by clicking *HERE*. Ms. Morris is a contributing author for Ignite Social Media. An excerpt follows:

Since 2009, all categories of respondents except for Hobbyists report that they are blogging more frequently. The top reasons for blogging more frequently were for valuable business promotion and for the enjoyment of interacting with readers. Blog growth is supported by other statistics:

BlogPulse reports 51,938 new blogs created in the last 24 hours; 152,948,304 blogs overall
WordPress reports continued growth with 27 millions publishers and 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com. See more WordPress statistics here and here. [Excerpt Ended] ####

Take a brief look at some charts furnished by Technorati, generally acknowledged as the foremost blog rating service. These charts (you may have to magnify them a bit) yield quantitative information not only about the proliferation of blogging activity, but about the relationship between consumerism (both B2C and B2B) and the information provided by bloggers. Note the increasing influence that bloggers are having on consumer behavior. The first chart represents 2010 data, while the second chart represents 2009 data. The trends are continuing to favor the influence of blogs and of bloggers.

The article that you are reading (i.e., the one I've written) is using Blogger as a platform. The little graphic and hyperlinked tidbit which follow popped up on my screen several hours ago, when I started my work on this article.

See what's coming to Blogger
Log in to Blogger in draft to experiment with upcoming features.
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The Bottom Line: Blogging is becoming an ever-more significant component of every brand's marketing mix, with very few exceptions. For you to use blogging effectively, which I will discuss in detail in the next installment of this series, you'll have to toss out everything that you've been taught about advertising, advertorials and ad copy. None of it applies here. In the blogosphere, your objective is to get your staff (firstly) and other unrelated, objective experts (secondly) to 1) give your brand a very Human persona and to 2) write/blog about you, your company and your brand in a credible third-party fashion.

My pledge: is to provide you with the specific ingredients required to build an effective campaign utilizing the vast leverage and reach of the blogosphere in my next installment of this article in InfoSphere Business Alerts And Intel. And it will not be a technological or technical treatise. It will be set forth in plain business-speak, for your immediate use and implementation. Technology is not my focus. Interacting optimally with your target market is my exclusive interest. I'm far less of a technologist and much more of a negotiator, speaker, strategic planner and an amateur behavioral psychology buff. Let's not get caught up in technology. The next installment is coming soon. Please look for it.

Douglas E Castle

http://InfoSphereBusinessAlerts.blogspot.com

http://TheGlobalFuturist.blogspot.com

http://MadMarketingTactics.blogspot.com

http://Links4LifeAlerts.com