Technorati released its State of the Blogosphere report on Monday in a five-part, five-day series that covers everything from the high-level “who is blogging now?” to the nitty gritty of making a living from a blog. Though only the first three sections have been released thus far, there is ample information and data to analyze, from the demographics of bloggers today to the reasons for blogging in the first place.

133 million blog records have been indexed by Technorati since 2002, of which 1.5 million have had posts in the last seven days.  And of these bloggers, the report finds that:

• 70% are college graduates
• 59% have been blogging more than two years
• 40% have an annual household income of $75K or more per year
• 66% are male
• 63% are between the ages of 25 and 44
• 48% are located in North America

Bloggers may also be segmented by category of blogging: personal, professional, or corporate.

I’ve gone through two of the three myself.  In 2000, I started a personal blog which eventually carried right on through college and served as my primary means of keeping in contact with my high school friends.  This year I started my professional blog – yes, you’re looking at it – after ten years of internet marketing experience, the last two of which have been in a corporate setting.  The latter is not much, I agree, but I’m a strong advocate for self-teaching.  And I do intend to venture into the corporate blog setting in the near future.

Other interesting subjects within the State of the Blogosphere report are the reasons for blogging and measuring one’s success.  A whopping 75% of bloggers consider “personal satisfaction” to be a major measure of success, but 82% consider more than one factor in determining how successful he or she is as a blogger, including, but not limited to:

• the number of comments or posts (58%)
• the number of unique visitors (53%)
• the number of links from other sites (46%)
• Technorati authority or rank (33%)

How do I gauge the success of this blog?  Unique visitors is the first thing I check every morning, but that’s more for curiosity’s sake.  I analyze the keywords that people have used to get here in order to determine what page on Google I get for those keywords I’m trying to target.  I also analyze where the visitors have come from – was it a Google search?  Was it from a blog directory like BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog?  Was it from an article that linked back to me?  The more I have from different sites, the happier I am, and the better sense of accomplishment I have.

The State of the Blogosphere report is a great tool both for those just getting into blogging as well as the hardened veterans, and I do recommend you read the sections that are there now as well as the final parts that will appear later today and tomorrow.

• Technorati’s Annual State of the Blogosphere Published
• The Real State of the Blogosphere
• Technorati Numbers Highlight the Changing Nature of Blogging

Brokers on Wall Street weren’t the only individuals cringing over the crisis last week, nor was this the first verification that the U.S. economy is in a recession.  The ramifications of large drops in the stock market, coupled with the mortgage crisis, have affected everyone from blue-collar factory workers to hundred-year-old investment banks, and not even those of us trying to earn a buck doing online work are immune.

The Deal, a provider business and financial news to corporate and financial dealmakers, advisers and institutional investors, interviewed a number of gurus and entrepreneurs at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City last week regarding the current state of Internet business in the growing recession and their reactions to such.

While venture capitalists see a bleaker future for start-ups seeking funding, CEO Miles Beckett of Eqal, the company behind Internet phenomena lonelygirl15 and KateModern, believes that sound money-management is key to surviving in a bad economy.  “The good thing is, entertainment does well in a recession,” he said, laughing.  “We’ve always been very, very cost-conscious as a company … we try not to overhire, try not to reach too far, too fast.”  Eqal’s chief operating officer, Greg Goodfried, notes that strategic partnerships are key to generating revenue in the short-term, but to maintain internal ideas and projects for long-term growth.

Companies that sell sales and marketing tools are in a very healthy place as well.  Umberto Milletti is CEO of InsideView, a company that proclaims to “take advantage of the convergence of social media and enterprise applications – what [they] call ’socialprise’ – and bring the insights gained from subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise.”

Milletti says, “Historically, sales and marketing applications like ours are helped by a tough economy,” citing Salesforce.com’s success in the early part of this decade.  “Frankly, I think [a poor economy] is sometimes the best opportunity because the weak companies get weeded out, and the strong ones make it.  For a healthy market, you do need these times where the good companies break away from the not-as-compelling companies.”

Mary Kathleen Flynn, Senior Editor at The Deal, also speaks with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Lane Becker of GetSatisfaction, and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, and you can view the entire interview at BlipTV.

The economy’s rough, and it will probably get worse before it gets better, and to survive in a poor economy you should always consider the following:

1. Be cost-conscious.  Don’t overspend, don’t overhire.  You don’t need that corporate jet just yet.
2. Have integrity.  Your potential customers are likely to be very concerned about budgets right now, so ensure that you don’t tell them one thing and deliver another.
3. Don’t lay your big ideas to rest, but put them aside for now in favor of immediate revenue-generating projects.  Remember that this too shall pass.  The U.S. been through a number of recessions, and that is likely the same for other countries, but economies do bounce back in the end.

And if in fact you provide a service that thrives in a poor or unstable economy, enjoy it now!  Those offering cost-friendly alternatives to pricier products should use this time to their advantage, and focus on the soft spots within companies that are struggling now with the high costs of their current solutions.  Providing a more efficient solution to companies that need it, while earning some revenue for your own company, is just great business.

• Advertising in a Recession means Digital, SEO, and SMO
• Can Social Media Grow In a Recession?
• A Top Ten List for Mobile Marketers Facing Recession

My company has been having a sales boot camp this week, as we recently hired five inside sales people and a sales manager. The term “boot camp” is different from a “kick-off,” which we hold on a yearly basis, in that the boot camp is a deep and intense five days in which the new hires getting presented every facet of the company by various managers, directors, and VPs from 8:30AM until 5PM every day. The kick-offs that we have had have been in a round-table discussion format, wherein all of inside sales, sales engineers, sales managers, and marketing folks gather to discuss what’s working, what’s not, any new messaging that may have been developed, and the large accounts on which people are working. Kick-offs tend to have a vastly more exciting setting as well; in 2007 about forty of us stayed at Caesar’s in Atlantic City for three days of meetings … and other things, of course. :)

Yesterday I, along with our VP of marketing, gave our presentation about what’s happening with marketing now and what we plan to do in the future, and how it will affect the sales team. The VP gave the high-level overview, including some of our main objectives that are pretty standard in the industry – increasing downloads and registrations, to name one – and then I dove into a brief technical overview of the inner workings of Eloqua and the advantages of its integration with Salesforce.com.

Eloqua is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that prides itself on being the leader in marketing automation. I have used it since my third week at the company, and, through a mixture of fiddling with the software on my own and taking a three-day training course up at their headquarters in Toronto, I happen to be pretty comfortable with it.

Now, on top of the basic email campaigns we send out on a regular basis, I am able to track and nurture all online registrations prior to them reaching the sales team. I developed a program within Eloqua’s Program Builder that fills in details we otherwise would not have gotten from a straight web site form, including where the leads came from (search engine, Google AdWords, partner site, etc.) and exactly what they downloaded. After registering, the system automatically sends a number of emails to each registrant over the course of a few months and tracks any subsequent web activity. All of this information is then fed into the Salesforce.com integration program, which sends them to the sales team for follow-up.

Eloqua is a great system to use for automating things that would otherwise take hours if not days to manually produce. Lead scoring, wherein a lead receives points based on web site activity, downloads, industry, and other qualifying factors, is relatively simple to set up, and with this you can easily provide your sales team with the most qualified leads possible – all before any live person ever touches them.

The downsides to using Eloqua are twofold:

1. The user interface is not intuitive. Yes, I know my way around Eloqua very well, and can quickly create a program that defines a lead source and score, but this is after two years of working with the system on a near-daily basis. There is quite a long learning curve, and while the training helps, just digging in and playing around is your best means of ‘getting’ the extremely powerful system. Just be prepared to spend quite a bit of time doing it. If you don’t have that kind of time, Marketo claims to offer “sophisticated yet easy” marketing automation, so be sure to check out their product if you’re looking for software that will entail a little less work for you.
2. It is expensive. For a start-up without a hefty amount of VC funds, Eloqua’s prices can seem daunting at the high end of the five figures per year. Indeed, the system can take quite a bite out of your marketing budget, and I know some people aren’t willing to do that, even though Eloqua is probably the most powerful system in the market today. But, as with everything else, there are alternatives. Manticore blatantly boasts that it is “Eloqua competition” on its web site, and advertises itself as the low-cost alternative.

Depending on the needs of your marketing organization, Eloqua does provide stellar support, a system that (two years in) has never failed, seamless integration with Salesforce.com, and a number of useful tools to deliver qualified leads that have been scored and nutured, which gives your sales team some the most valuable information they could ever hope to receive.

• Implementing a Marketing Automation Solution
• Picking a New Breed Automated-Marketing Vendor
• Building and Measuring Lead Nurturing Programs

Traditional PR has involved a public relations firm dropping your press release on the wire and hoping somebody picks it up. Sure, they may have conversations with analysts prior to the drop, but in this Web 2.0 era even you can make a huge splash on a ‘Net, grab the attention of thousands, and, perhaps, even get some conversions or sales out of it, all for no added cost to you. All it requires is a little elbow grease and the right kind of thinking.

Ensure that your title, header, and first paragraph include your targeted keywords.

The title of your press release needs to include your biggest keywords, and these keywords should be emphasized within the introductory paragraph of the release as well. The introduction can be normal paragraph length, but do make sure that you have a headline between the title and the introductory paragraph that sums up the piece in 100 characters or less. And don’t over-saturate your press release with your keywords, either. You lose valuable search engine points for that.

Utilize headers to their full potential.

Headers benefit you in two ways: one, it breaks up the content and makes your press release much easier to read, and two, they’re an easy SEO tweak. <h1> tags are the strongest rated by search engines, and they go down from there. Remember, though, to only have one <h1> tag in a release, otherwise they are likely to be disregarded by the search engine spiders as trying to mess with the crawling system. Plus, it looks juvenile, and is not pleasant on the eyes.

Use descriptive, keyword-rich text anchors for links to your website.

You cannot expect your appearance in Google searches to improve dramatically if the links to your site just look like URLs. Ensure that links within your press release have appropriate, keyword-rich anchor text. This way, wherever the press release is picked up on the ‘Net will link to your site with the keywords that are important to your company. ‘Tis far better for people to link to you with “online PR tips” as the anchor than it is with “www.yourcompanyname.com/products/newamazingproduct.html.”

Also, never waste these links by directing them at your home page. Guide clickthroughs to an informative, valuable inner page, even if it means creating a landing page from scratch. This way, the meat of your web site is what gets viewed, rather than the superficial, oft-bounced-from home page.

Allow viewers to share the content easily.

Through RSS feeds, links to social bookmarking sites, and email subscriptions, your press release’s message can travel further and be seen by thousands more people than it otherwise would by simply dropping it on the wire as in the days before social media. Of these thousands of people, Justin Levy, author of That’s Great PR! Blog, says, “Many will click on the link to your website to see what you’re all about. Some of those will even buy from you. So rather than putting all your eggs in one basket with the … major media channel of your choice, you do better to diversify and let larger numbers of people in smaller, under served niches find you.” When you post your press release to your web site, ensure that you have links to various social media outlets. Insert a means of allowing readers to subscribe to your feed, thereby allowing them to automatically view any new press releases you may have in the future.

Perhaps most importantly, set up a Google alert to let you know when your press release is being discussed by outside sources, and be sure to submit these articles to social bookmarking sites. It is important to note that straight press releases are Dugg or Stumbled-Upon far, far less than the commentary surrounding it.

Provide a straightforward call to action.

You have the most incredible news story in the world. People will read your press release, no doubt about it – but then what? Conversions come from giving visitors a single path to the information they desire, and they’ll continue along that path provided each step gives them information or content that is a little more valuable than the stuff before. Thus, drop the press release with a paragraph that details a new whitepaper that is available on the same subject, or link to a free trial of the product you’re launching.

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