Social media has changed a lot… imagine life before it.  And it continues to change and shape the online (and offline!) world every day.

It’s fundamental and it’s key to your own business success.  Don’t just take our word for it, look at the millions who use it every hour of every day.

We’ve all;

- had trouble developing our client base;

- over-spent on marketing;

- struggled to understand and demonstrate our ROI (return on investment) when it comes to promoting our brand(s), products, services.

And that’s the short list!!

Social Media can deliver targeted, relevant followers and clients.  The integration of Twitter into Google shows the awesome power of Social Media and we hardly need to touch on Facebook, but we will   Facebook has an incredibly loyal following.

Just take on board one stat:  “50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day”

Imagine leveraging even part of that for your business.

Click here for the Top 18 Social Media Resources for Developers.  It’s a great list and full of fantastic information.

Even in this super-tech era, people still love strange, bizarre, diverse, interesting hobbies.

And that’s a real testament to diversity of interest and human behaviour; it’s interesting and rewarding.

We were sad to see, recently, that some of them, however, have started to close down.  And we’re trying to understand why.

This one was good in its time but is now dormant:  hobbyblog.blogspot.com/

Let us have your comments, please?

Genuine, good, business blogs are hard to find.  But they’re gems.

There’s a mass of amazing information out there in the blogosphere, but a lot of it is diluted or just plain hidden behind money-making ideas and get-rich-quick scams.

You won’t regret looking at some of these, below (totally unrelated to ClubBlogger, may we add!)

Enjoy

• A VC
• About.com Entrepreneurs
• Biz Informer
• Biz Plan Hacks
• BizzBangBuzz
• Blog Business World
• Blogtrepreneur
• Boostrap Me
• Bootstrapper
• Branding & Marketing
• Business Blog Consulting
• Business Opportunities and Ideas
• Business Opportunities Weblog
• Business Pundit
• Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Blog
• Church Of The Customer
• Consultant Journal
• Copy Blogger
• CreateBusinessGrowth
• David Allen, Getting Things Done
• Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing
• Drew McLellan – The Marketing Minute
• Duct Tape Marketing
• eMoms At Home
• EmpowerWomenNow
• Escape from Cubicle Nation
• Fast Company
• Freelance Folder
• Freelance Switch
• HELLO, My Name Is Blog
• How To Change The World
• Influential Marketing Blog
• Instigator Blog
• Marketing Deviant
• MicroPersuasion
• MindPetals
• Net Business Blog
• Occam’s Razor
• Rough Type
• Self Made Minds
• Seth Godin
• Small Biz Survival
• Small Biz Trends
• Small Business Canada
• Smart Wealthy Rich
• Solo Entrepreneur
• Sox First
• Springwise
• Startup Addict Musings
• Startup Spark
• Stuff4Business
• Success From The Nest
• Successful Blog
• The Digerati Life
• The Engaging Brand
• The Entrepreneurial Mind
• The Freestyle Entrepreneur
• The KISS Business
• The Marketing Technology Blog
• The Personal MBA
• The Selling Sherpa
• Todd And
• Trust Matters
• Working At Home On The Internet
• Young Go Getter

The time:-  10:00 am PT (1:00 pm ET) today.

The event: Apple will unwrap the Tablet.

Amazing pictures leaked a short while ago:

If you’re asking “I really need a list…get me a list…where can I buy a list…” then you’re probably already in totally the wrong place to achieve successful marketing by email.

You don’t want to ’scatter gun’ any list; certainly not one you haven’t built and generated in a targeted, controlled way.

Yes, you can ‘rent’ or ‘buy’ a list.  But it’s a one-hit wonder.  And actually probably a one-hit failure.

But if you develop and nurture your own, valuable list you benefit from generating a customer relationship; a reader relationship; real engagement with those who buy your produce, use your service, read your blog

The 10 key areas:

• Who’s your audience and why should they listen to you?
• When you email them, what, exactly, are you trying to achieve?
• What will your mailings look like – would you read them? Would they make you take action?
• Will you – actually, SHOULD you – do the writing and construct the mailings? Are you really up for it?
• How regularly will you mail and how long will your mailings be?
• Those email addresses won’t just magically appear – how will you collect them?  Always do it ethically, whether via web form or other opt-in method – do it right, do it well, do it consistently.
• The last point bears repetition: ALL recipients must have in advance expressly asked you to mail them.  And if they don’t want to hear your drivel anymore, make it easy for them to switch you off!
• Is your technology scalable to grow your list?  Will the length of the list actually become a problem? How will you store/host your list – internally or will you outsource.
• Whatever you do, you MUST create and maintain TRUST.
• You must add value.

Be honest. Be genuine. Be successful.

CB

Well, it’s been rumoured just as intensely as it has been debated whether Elvis is really dead. And now the moment of truth: the impending Keynote is likely to reveal the piece of kit you’ve all been waiting for.

It’d be very, very cool wouldn’t it?

But how useful will it be? And will it hammer other pieces of geek kit like the Kindle? We really do feel so.

IS THIS REALLY IT?…..

It’s easy to be a little bit sceptical, especially with the not-so-accidental hype. But, remember how people, now unbelievable, criticized and were sceptical of iconic gadgets such as the iPod and iPhone were before they released.

Remember – Apple generally (not quite always) “does excellent”. So hang on – wait a minute and see. We predict a riot

Factery Labs pledges to bring just the facts. A BIG promise. But it sounds damn good.

Factery Labs (when its server isn’t down due to overload – isn’t popularity great?) is a service which serves-up facts and allows the reader to lift-out the key nuggets of info he/she has been searching for – is this the holy grail of search?

Its consumer engine has just launched (following a developer API test at the back end of last year).

Whilst its front-end needs a polish, it’s quite intuitive and easy to use. It’s heavily-based on trends (we’re all pretty interested in those) and, yes, Twitter feeds are key, here.

The ‘facts’ are categorised and served up for you on a sesame bun. C’mon – don’t take all the hard work out of using search engines

The lack of this has been a thorn in Google’s side for a while. In fact, it’s been a problem for any search engine.

As you’ll probably know, the huge success of Twitter has been built on a number of key foundations, including near-instant (short form) communication.

Quite recently, Bing tied-up a deal with Twitter. Guess what? Google wasn’t going to be far behind. Surprise, surprise: not.

Twitter’s tweets, an amazing feed of ‘live’, topical, content-rich data is going to be crucial to Google’s search results. Whether it’s the latest news, celebrity gossip or details of inter-planetary collision

From the Google blog:

“Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

See more here for how relevance and real-time have hooked up – big time.

This kind of stole the thunder of Bing…

For Twitter, though, a site with massive usage but a, let’s say, ’stretched’ business plan, this is amazing news and a tribute to the founder Jack Dorsey and those who run the thing. It’s also great news for those CIOs of major businesses and others in many other areas of life who took a step off the precipice and decided to integrate Twitter functionality/interactivity into their own ventures, seeing it as much, much more than a passing fad.

Put the world’s best search engine together with a dynamic, fresh source of data from across the planet: sound like a potential success to anyone?

We’re going to launch our new tools feature in the near future.

This will give you a range of useful stuff in one place… anything from links to free hosts, to domain utilities, counters, you name it.

If you have any burning ideas, shout now:  we’ll try to include what you’d like.

Catch you soon,

CB

Well.

It got your attention  Which is good, since we’ve literally just launched v.2.0 of ClubBlogger and we need all our users (existing and new) to sign-up!

Apart from that, the above isn’t just a philosophical statement.  It goes to the hear of blogging; and what keeps bloggers going.

You may have the seed of an idea; or one is already growing or has grown into something real (be it a business, a hobby, you name it) . It may be something you love; cherish; value; strive for; hate, even (we’ll come back to the last one: it’s interesting, believe me). And you want, need, have to write about it.  And others want, need, have to read about it.

We’re undergoing awesome new changes here at ClubBlogger and have been considering what makes us, errr, tick.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s still the same core thing which kicked-off our time in the blogosphere: enjoying writing about and sharing interesting stuff.  We have tended to be business-biased in terms of topics, but certainly that’s not an exclusive road for us; indeed, many of our readers prefer the other stuff we write about (I’m not convinced that’s a good thing!).

So, what’s changing?  Well, we’ve always been focused on community.  The name of the site’s a bit of a give away in that respect.  So we’re opening-up into real ‘club blogging’ and with that interactive social networking for our users.  The site isn’t fully ready yet; it doesn’t look like what we envisage as the end-game.  But what is ever ready?  No, we won’t dive into philosophy again.

But it IS ready to use – JOIN US, GUYS!!!

Fact is, to make things happen in life you need to start.  And we’re not ones for keeping things hidden under a blanket.  Watch this space, all.

Best, CB x