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There’s never a dull moment in the parent blogging world. This past month has brought new highs and lows to this group, a group I’m firmly enmeshed in both as an agency which works with bloggers and as the founder of a conference bloggers attend. (I also happen to be married to a parenting blogger – my husband blogs on his own dad blog as well as in a number of other outlets.)

Mom 2.0 Summit

The high was most certainly the Mom 2.0 Summit, a fantastic conference for moms (and others) who blog (there were many men in attendance, and many non-moms too – my husband joined me). This was my fourth annual Mom 2.0; 2013 was their fifth anniversary, so I’ve only missed one.

This year’s Mom 2.0 Summit was, as always, stellar. The very best thing about the conference was the quality of people there. Mom 2.0 never fails to bring the cream-of-the-crop of bloggers together to share, learn and grow.  These are bloggers who are amazing storytellers, beautiful writers, and really smart marketers. Quite a few of them make their living through their blogging and writing, and they are all wholly deserving of the success which has come to them.  Learning, schmoozing, dining and networking with this group is always energizing and insightful. And it didn’t hurt that the conference was at the Ritz-Carleton in gorgeous Laguna Beach, CA.

The Wall Street Journal Article

If more sponsors understand that blog conferences are a good way to reach digital influencers, we all win

However, in the lead up to Mom 2.0, the conference (and others) got some interesting press. The Wall Street Journal published an article about “The Mommy Business Trip,” which raised more than a few hackles as it portrayed blogging conferences as kid-free boondoggles for women. Many people, some of my good friends included, objected to the portrayal of moms and women in the piece, and I understand their concern.

But ever the contrarian, I didn’t completely agree with them. I found the WSJ piece, while certainly more than a bit condescending, good for the blogging conference industry overall. If more sponsors understand that blog conferences are a good way to reach digital influencers, we all win – the conference providers as well as the attendees.

It’s only recently that some parenting and lifestyle blog conference attendees are beginning to understand the reason that the cost of attending a blogging conference (as a blogger) is only $200-$450 for three days is because of the sponsors who are willing to pay to meet and talk to them.  Other digital industry conferences, from Affiliate Summit to AdTech to New Media Expo, cost between $800-$2,000, and provide far less for that cost than most blogging conferences provide. For the most part, blogger conferences have higher costs and lower margins than any other industry conferences (a fact which I’m intimately aware of).

There’s one big similarity between them: they’re all business-to-business (B2B) events.  Sponsors (businesses) come to blogging conferences to reach business people (bloggers) who will help them reach their target audience (typically, consumers).  This is the same as any other business-focused conference.

(Some) Bloggers Are Businesses

So ladies: stop acting like the Wall Street Journal says you’re acting. Because guess what? Some of you are.

So why do bloggers, at nearly all of the blogging conferences I’ve attended, not act like they’re businesses?  I do realize that if you started your blog as a personal blog or hobby blog, you may not know how to run your business, or even want to run a business, for your blog. But if you’ve spent the money and the time to come to a blogging event, it indicates that you’re looking to learn and grow in some way. (And apologies if you’re at the conference but do not want to grow your business – though given that much of the content at Mom 2.0 and other blogging conferences is related to “monetization” and “sponsorships,” I have to assume you likely do want to.)

So ladies: stop acting like the Wall Street Journal says you’re acting. Because guess what? Some of you are. Start acting like the business people you (mostly) seem to want to become.  Because if you’re not becoming business people by attending these conferences, then you really are doing it just to get out of the house. And then I don’t blame the WSJ for calling a spade a spade.

You need proof? At last summer’s mother of all blog conferences, BlogHer, I saw far too many women drunk off of their you-know-whats, barely able to get back to their hotel rooms. There are now-legendary stories of women pushing and shoving their way to grab sponsor swag at these events. And the social-network-based backchannel conversations before and after these events? Well…if you could see some of the name calling that happens when this person doesn’t get invited to a party but that one does; it’s not pretty.

Yes, of course, men do ridiculous things on the road too, and that’s what many people were reacting to as they read the WSJ article. Why doesn’t a major publication write an expose on the alcohol-filled parties at International CES or the intense city-wide party hopping that is SxSW? I’d love to see that article written, but of course it won’t be any time soon.

Up the Professionalism

If we women want to be taken seriously as business people, we’ve got to start acting like it.

I am certainly not saying that getting away for work to a beautiful location, with amazing content and the very best networking, shouldn’t a pleasurable thing. Whenever I go to any conference – blogging or otherwise – I go to plenty of parties; take time for myself at the beach, spa or touring the city; and often arrange fancy group dinners with friends. I bring swag home just like everyone else. But ultimately, I’m there on business, and I hope that my participation always reflects a high level of professionalism.

If we women want to be taken seriously as business people, we’ve got to start acting like it. Women bloggers need to treat their blog businesses like businesses, not as sometimes or part-time jobs (regardless of how much time they put into them). We must boost each other up, not become the worst versions of ourselves, when we go away to network and learn. And even if we stay home.

Disclosure: My conference, the Digital Family Summit, is loosely affiliated with Mom 2.0 Summit. I receive no direct compensation for my relationship with Mom 2.0 Summit.

Path may finally be taking off in the United States, according to a Wall Street Journal interview with CEO Dave Morin.

It’s now in the top 20 most-downloaded apps in the App Store, and it’s adding a million registered users a week, Morin said.

The mobile-only social network, which claims to offer a more intimate experience than Facebook, has drawn most of its users from Asia.

But since it launched version 3.0 in March, Path has been gaining ground in the United States, Morin told the Journal. The network has seen spikes in western U.S. cities, including Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles, and in New York.

The update introduced messaging, as well as stickers, geared at the core Asian audience.

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So as not to create confusion about what exactly is going on between Google, the European Union and Google’s friends at FairSearch.org here are the highlights of what appears to be going on with Google in its continuing battle with the EU and various ‘competitors’.

• For three years Google and its treatment of its search results have been under investigation by the EU or the European Commission (EC) (I get confused myself on this one so forgive me).
• FairSearch.org and its member companies have been after the EU to punish Google for claims of unfair trade practices which include charges of Google being a search monopoly
• A New York Ties headline from Saturday reads “Europeans Reach Deal With Google on Searches” while a Wall Street Journal from yesterday reads “Google Proposes Settlement Terms to EU Regulators“. You choose which one you would like to agree with but based on other reports it appears as if Google is offering a ‘solution’ that would avoid fines and prevent a monopolistic labeling of the company. This proposal is allowed to be reviewed by competitors once it is enacted. You can guess what they will say.
• The competition, without actually seeing anything has replied as reported by Bloomberg

Google, operator of the world’s largest Internet search engine, told the Brussels-based EU that it would create more distinction in searches between its own services and competitors, a person familiar with the negotiations said last week. Google also proposed to offer links to rival search engines, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the details of the offer aren’t public.

“If what has been proposed is labeling or a modified form of labeling, frankly that’s a non-starter,” said David Wood, a lawyer for Brussels-based industry group ICOMP, which includes Microsoft. “We haven’t seen the proposals and the commission hasn’t explained them to us. We’re in the dark.”

Yeah, you read that correctly. Nothing has been seen but it’s a non-starter. You can guess where this is heading can’t you?

The NYT reports that Google is playing nice

A Google spokesman, Al Verney, declined to comment beyond repeating Google’s statement that it continued “to work cooperatively with the European Commission.” Antoine Colombani, a commission spokesman, did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

There are many more elements but from how the competition is already responding it almost seems pointless to consider this being anywhere near a final agreement. With the process being what it is, which allows the competition to actually tell the EU if what they are proposing is OK rather than the EU taking the reigns and deciding it for everyone, this situation may be in a state of limbo for some time to come.

In the end, it appears that if the people of FairSearch and ICOMP want to keep Google in the courts (and actually in the news while making themselves look more and more like vindictive incompetents rather than actual business people) it may turn out to work in favor of Google. That’s an option, at least.

So get knee deep in the details if you want by reading many different takes including this one over at Search Engine Land. As it looks at this point there is more legal wrangling ahead and as long as the EU shows no spine there is likely to be not much true progress.

What are your thoughts on this? We have asked SO many times in the past but the question still begs an answer “Is Google creating an environment that is unfair to the competition OR are they simply better than the rest?”. Are the courts the best way to do business? Does this kind of activity on the part of a competitive collective put true innovation at risk or is it the right way to go about competing?

We would love to get your impressions.

Despite exceeding analysts’ expectations in the first quarter, Groupon’s stock is trading at 63 percent below its initial public offering price of $20 per share. To add injury to insult, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Groupon’s sales force may be jumping ship as well.

continued…

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Groupon is a bit of an enigma isn’t it?

It does tons of business but it has the reputation that implies that the business it does is often in spite of itself. Now, as it prepares for its third public reporting of results Monday, the news is that the lifeblood of the company, the sales force, is at best, under a ridiculous amount of pressure or, at worst, jumping ship.

The Wall Street Journal reports

Groupon Inc. is facing a new hurdle: strains on its sales force.

Such pressures are a boon to people like Mike Silagadze. The chief executive of education-software firm Top Hat Monocle Inc. said that over the past month, his Toronto start-up has received hundreds of résumés from Groupon sales representatives who may want to jump ship. Mr. Silagadze said he interviews a couple of such people each day.

A Groupon attorney last month sent Mr. Silagadze a letter saying Top Hat was improperly recruiting Groupon employees. Top Hat’s 25-person sales staff includes eight former Groupon employees.

Groupon’s turnover is “getting even worse when their best people are starting to leave,” Mr. Silagadze said, adding that he plans to continue hiring from the daily-deals company.

While that may not be a huge problem for some companies it is for Groupon. According to the Journal about 5,400 of the 12,000 employees of the company are in sales. The company’s performance is based on their sales efforts and it appears that the machine that runs Groupon may have some issues.

But this is not an unusual occurrence with Groupon either. From the sophomoric antics of its CEO Andrew Mason to not being able to figure out how real businesses do math, Groupon has been an ongoing case study in what not to do to get big and go public. Even their PR comments to papers like the Journal show that Groupon is a bit less than a real business despite real money. I am still a bit amazed at this comment given to the Journal for its story.

A Groupon spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Silagadze’s remarks but said the company “continues to professionalize everything it does, from sales, to process, to organization, to technology.”

If it is continuing to professionalize its business what in the world was it when it went public and took all of that money at $26 a share for it to have closed at $7.44 on Friday?

I am not an analyst. I don’t have insider information but I have never trusted anything that comes from Groupon. Call it a gut feeling. Having some experience in the sales world myself all I needed to hear about the company that shows it is truly in trouble is how they changed the comp plans for its sales force and essentially cut pay significantly.

Commissions shifted from a couple of percentage points of Groupon’s gross profit on each deal to a sliding scale under which employees made little on commission until they met or exceeded aggregate monthly profit targets, former employees said. Two former salespeople said Groupon wasn’t transparent about how it set the monthly gross-profit goals, which sometimes rose with little notice. For some staff who relied on commissions for the bulk of their pay, the changes meant a pay cut of thousands of dollars, former employees said.

All of this points to a company that is in real trouble. Maybe the numbers reported today will help take some of the edge off the issues but, then again, they might make them worse.

It’s a strange thing to hear from the co-founder and CEO of a photo startup, but DMD Panorama‘s Elie-Gregoire Khoury tells me that panoramic photos will become “a commodity at the end of the day.” That doesn’t mean it’s time to get out of the photo business — instead, Khoury wants to see panoramas become a standard feature in a wide range of websites and apps, the way that regular photos are now.

And if Khoury has his way, that will all happen through DMD’s new API.

Since launching in June 2011 on the iPhone, DMD Panorama has been downloaded 4.5 million times, Khoury says. His aim was to build the fastest, easiest way to take panoramic photos, and he may have succeeded — this Wall Street Journal article, for example, describes the app as “the easiest-to-use panoramic picture app on the iPhone.”

I was definitely impressed when I tried the app out for myself. To take a panoramic picture, you just activate the camera and move the phone sideways, bringing together the yin and yang signs on your screen. The process is only slightly more complicated and time-consuming than taking a normal photo.

DMD Panorama was built by a five-person team in Lebanon. Khoury says the country’s infrastructure presented a few challenges — like only six hours of electricity per day and a 2 gigabyte monthly download cap on the office Internet connection — but the company succeeded in making hit app, and itrased raised angel funding from investors including early Googler Georges Harik and the Berytech Fund.

Now Khoury is hoping to enlist app developers to use DMD’s free API. Ultimately, Khoury wants DMD to power the photo-taking experience in any app where panoramic photos might be useful — for example, Khoury suggests that DMD could bring panoramic photos into a postcard app, or it could help people take panoramic pictures to show off their homes in rental apps like Airbnb.

Users will need to have DMD Panorama installed in order to take advantage of the integration, but once they do, the goal is to create a seamless experience between DMD and integrated apps. So when using another app, users could hit a “panorama” button (or whatever) at the appropriate moment, which would either open DMD Panorama or prompt them to install it. They take the photo in DMD, then they’re returned to the original app.

Khoury says he’s testing the API out with a few partners before opening it up more broadly, so interested developers should email api (at) DerManDar (dot) com.

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, well-known for her obsessive dedication to products like Google’s search and Gmail, isn’t wasting time on shaking up Yahoo’s complacent corporate attitude.

The former Google executive is pushing Yahoo to focus more on its products and users, a big shift from the business focused chief executives like Scott Thompson and Ross Levinsohn, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Mayer has previously said that she wouldn’t reveal any grand plans to fix Yahoo until she reviewed all of its businesses. But judging from the WSJ’s report, it sounds like Mayer hasn’t wasted much time in putting her touch on Yahoo. The philosophical shift is also particularly impressive considering she’s only been on the job for three weeks.

The report notes that Mayer has removed Yahoo’s stock ticker from its internal company website, a sign that employees should be more focused on Yahoo’s products instead of its finances. Mayer has also expressed interest in revamping Yahoo’s search experience (the underlying technology of which is powered by Microsoft’s Bing), as well as a plan to spread Yahoo’s content and ads throughout the web, sources tell the WSJ. Mayer is also now approving every new Yahoo hire, and she’s begun weekly “FYI meetings” to stay in touch with Yahoo employees.

For Yahoo, a company that has seemed like a black hole of innovation for the past decade, Mayer’s singular focus on products can only be a good thing. But it remains to be seen how much innovation Mayer can milk out of Yahoo’s existing products. The company could potentially buoy its products through acquisitions, but with only around $2 billion in cash on-hand, any purchases would have to be sure-fire successes to be worthwhile.

Photo JD Lasica/Flickr

Filed under: VentureBeat

Writing solid content is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to marketing a successful blog. It’s important to advantage of search engines by building link equity, flattening your blog, and using other SEO tactics to make sure your content is getting the attention it deserves. These seven SEO tips can play a major role in pushing your blog up the search engine totem pole, allowing you to rank higher and therefore garner more visitors to your site.

1. Make sure your pages link to each other so your link equity is spread out

If you have a blog article with 100 backlinks and another page with 3, the page with 3 backlinks is going to have a much harder time ranking on Google, unless those backlinks happen to be cnn.com, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. However, if your page with 100 backlinks links to the less popular page, it will share link equity, thereby helping it to rank better. Re-linking all your articles to one another can be a tedious process, but fortunately WordPress has plugins for automated internal linking, such as “SEO Auto Links & Related Posts”. Check it out.

2. Flatten your blog

How information is organized into categories, pages, and subpages on a website, and how they link to each other is called site architecture or information architecture. Site architecture tends to fall into two modes: flat site architecture and deep site architecture. Deep sites tend to waste link equity, partly because the search engines see the higher level pages as more important.

The graphic below demonstrates a deep site, with four layers. Google is going to assume the category pages are the most important, because from the home page, Google’s webcrawlers will encounter the category pages first. If the majority of your content is 3 or more clicks away from your home page, the search engines will see these “lower” pages as less important, and may not even index them. The flatter your site structure is, the better its opportunity to rank well, and it will insure your pages remain in the search engine’s index to be found by searchers.

This site is deep, not flat.

3. Nofollow links to sites with which you don’t want/need to share link equity

Large sites like Wikipedia don’t really get much of a search engine ranking boost when you link to them, so you may as well save your precious link equity by using a nofollow link, which tells the search engines not to follow the link (and therefore not to transfer any of your link equity to that page).  Making a link nofollow is easy: you just add rel=”nofollow” inside that link’s HTML code, like this: <a href=”http://address.com” rel=”nofollow”>My Site</a>. If you’re using WordPress and would rather not deal with the code, check out the “Nofollow Link” plugin by Alex Jose, which makes the process a single button click.

4. Noindex pages that must be on your site, but do not need to rank

Most bloggers want their articles to rank on Google, as well as their home page (especially when searching for their name), but probably don’t need “About Me” or “Contact Me” to rank. If you have Terms of Service or Privacy Policy pages, you definitely don’t want them to rank. You should noindex them (which tells search engines not to include them at all). There are several ways to noindex a page:  modify your robots.txt file by adding Disallow: /example-directory/example-page.html, add  <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> to the page header, or use a WordPress plugin. Search for “noindex” in the plugin directory. You also may want to noindex your archives (which is a mirror image of your blog if you are the sole author) because Google penalizes sites for too much duplicate content.

5. Delete old articles that don’t rank

If you have articles that are more than two years old, are seldom read, and have little link equity, delete them, unless you have some sort of sentimental attachment to them. In that case, noindex them so they don’t dilute the link equity of other, stronger articles.

6. Put your most valuable keyword as the beginning of your post title

The title tag is the most important on-page element to keyword optimize, so your post has the best chance of ranking for a given keyword if that keyword appears at the beginning of the title tag (often the post headline). Also make sure other posts linking to this post use this keyword as their link text (what SEOs call “anchor text”).

7. Kill your reciprocal links

Reciprocal links have zero net SEO value, because they return exactly as much link equity as they receive. If you have any, delete them unless they are there for goodwill’s sake. You could nofollow them, but then you’d be tricking the person you made the reciprocal link agreement with (which most people would agree is a “gray hat” move). Some of the best quality links you can get are run-of-site links like blogroll links (as long as the sites are relevant to your blog), so get those if you can.

For more information about setting up your site architecture, check out my article Plan Your Site So It Ranks Online [Marketing Consulting Series] at Digital Marketing Blog.

How many of these tactics are you using on your blog? (note from Jay: we’re doing 1, 2, 6 at Convince & Convert. We’re working on 5, and should tackle the rest, too).

About the Tony Ahn:

Tony Ahn is Chief Digital Architect at Tony Ahn & Co., a hybrid marketing agency in Manila, Philippines that practices both traditional PR and digital marketing. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and major local corporations.

7 SEO Principles Bloggers Must Remember is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

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Should Facebook ‘Likes’ Be Protected by the First Amendment? (PC Magazine)
The Declaration of Independence proclaims the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of … liking friends’ Facebook statuses? That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union is proposing in its appeal of an April ruling that said the social network’s “Like” button is not protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech. Politico District Court Judge Raymond A. Jackson ruled this spring that several employees of the Hampton Virginia Sheriff’s Office, who were allegedly fired because they “liked” the Facebook page of Sheriff B.J. Roberts’ opponent in the 2009 election, didn’t do enough to warrant constitutional protection. “It is the Court’s conclusion that merely ‘liking’ a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection,” Jackson wrote in his opinion. The Verge Facebook this week filed a briefing in support of former deputy sheriff Daniel Ray Carter. The company “has a vital interest in ensuring that speech on Facebook and in other online communities is afforded the same constitutional protection as speech in newspapers, on television, and in the town square,” according to the document. The Wall Street Journal The social network is testing a new mobile ad product for app developers, the company said in a blog post Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reported in July on the new ad product and the technology that will power it, which lets Facebook target consumers based on the apps they use. Bloomberg The service helps game makers and other software developers encourage users to install applications on their mobile devices, Facebook said yesterday in a blog. The mobile-ad service is also designed to help app developers measure the effectiveness of their ads. continued…

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