MerchantCircle, Blogs and Bloglines

As you may already know, adding content to a blog you create about your area of expertise is what the new wave of personal publishing and reputation-building on the web is all about. Blogging your own short-format discussions about things you know about allows that information to get indexed by search engines offering a resource to others when they search for information on that subject. Do this periodically, and frequently, and you build a "content asset" that is authored by you, and builds your value on the web. The people who have done this for years now are among those recognized as relevant to the knowledge base about their subject on the web. Additionally, creating a track record in posts on a topic can result in you being seen and identified as an expert resource on the topic. Establishing yourself as an expert resource on a topic requires staying engaged, whether it be online or on the phone, as the go-to person in your community, easily found on the web with improving local search both online and mobile.



On MerchantCircle we have a platform for you to write a Blog, it’s easy to do and is the single most powerful thing you can do to improve your listing, your visibility on searches on the subject you write about, and your ranking when searches are done on your business category.



The MerchantCircle platform and network of merchants is designed to give our merchants easy tools to use that improve their posture on the web. By connecting to other merchants and consumers, adding information about their products and services, answering questions in our Q&A system, and writing informative short blog entries, our merchant users create attractive merchant-authored information that qualifies them as a resource to turn to for information about their business category.



Last week, we announced that we are now managing a one of the most popular blog and news reader sites ever called Bloglines. We took over this property because we believe in the future of personal publishing of expertise by people with experience, and have plans to make the Bloglines property one which features the best sources of user-authored content on a wide range of topics. Special attention will be paid to the topics which our merchant businesses address with their products and services. Bloglines is the granddaddy of "RSS Readers" (Really Simple Syndication on a user-defined Reader Page), and has been around since 2003. It makes aking it simple to subscribe to updates from personally selected Blogs and News sites, and have all those latest entries flow into one easy-to-read page. The Bloglines service fits in very nicely with the idea of fostering authoritative blogs and making it easy for users to digest the latest information about a subject. We will want to assemble great blogs on topics ranging from Plumbing to Healthcare Services, and would like our MerchantCircle members to contribute to that collection.



Look for more news in the first quarter of 2011 about how the Bloglines Reader service will be used at MerchantCircle to help you stay on top of your business but for now please enjoy the introduction to a service you will certainly value



Andy Halliday

 

P.S. You can contribute to the growing library of content discoverable on the web, and get attribution for that work, by answering questions in MerchantCircle's Q&A system, in forums online, and in Q&A sites with multiple categories that are designed to expose knowledge from both experts and the masses. A couple recent examples of the Q&A model of collective knowledge are Formspring and Quora. Quora is getting much on-the-web press and is attracting high quality contributors of content on a wide variety of subjects, though the subjects are currently focused around technology and internet startups given their roots.





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Andy Halliday



VP GM Local Content



andyh@merchantcircle.com