Startup Blog

I heard someone call HubSpot the "Web 2.0 Version of [a marketing software company]" this week.  It annoyed me.  Less because they were comparing HubSpot to a sort of boring company with complicated, expensive products that don't really work, but more because they described HubSpot as "web 2.0".

Top 10 Reasons Why HubSpot is NOT a Web 2.0 Company

1. Our company name is easy to spell.
2. We have more people over 25 in the company than under 25.
3. Our company name does not sound like it ends in "-er" but actually just ends in "r".
4. We are not based in a loft in San Francisco.
5. Our logo does not have a reflection in it.
6. Our product does not say "Beta" over 2 years after launch.
7. We do not have Guitar Hero in our office. 
8. Both of our co-founders have gray hair.
9. We have paying customers... lots of them.
10. Revenue.  Did I mention revenue?

 

I'm going on a safari in Kenya soon, and I spent a bunch of time today searching for and buying the right safari camera setup.  I took a photography class in high school and even developed my own stuff back then (remember film?) but since then I have been a point and shoot kind of guy.  I do have a small digital photo printer at home.  So, I contacted a couple people and read a lot online to get back into the game a bit. Based on advice from websites and friends that I emailed, here are my tips for how to get decent safari photos without spending tons of money on pro-level camera equipment.

Safari Camera Advice

1. Get a decent camera with telephoto lens, at least to 300mm, preferably with some for of vibration reduction or image stabilization.  You'll need it to get good pictures of the safari wildlife.  I bought a Nikon D60 with a 70-300mm lens, it worked perfectly.
2. Bring backup storage so you can backup your safari photos from your memory cards to something else so you don't lose your photos while on safari.  A lot of people like the Wolverine, it is made for things like this.  Apple makes an adapter for your iPod if you want a cheaper solution that really drains your battery, or there are dedicated devices.  I bought the Apple adapter for $35, but it did not really work, so I returned it.  I brought 10 GB of memory cards and then backed up my safari photos to my laptop each night.
3. In addition to a safari camera and good zoom lens, bring an extra battery, and maybe a car adapter with your charger.  Charge everything whenever possible.  Power availability is sometimes limited while on safari.  I bought an aftermarket battery and car charger for $50.  The battery was a great idea, but I never used the car charger.  For the Nikon D60, the battery lasted a whole day (at least) so with the backup battery there was no need to charge my camera battery on the go.
4. Get circular polarizer filters for all your lenses.  Even a little online research will indicate that they can make a big difference in high light conditions during the peak hours of the day while on safari, and they will help your camera take better safari photos.  (Tip: while taking photos, rotate the polarizer to get different effects/colors/tones to your photos.)
5. Make sure your safari organizer will provide photographer's beanbags for you to use to rest/stabilize your camera on the vehicle.  Otherwise you should bring one.  I did not use one, and that worked OK for me.  It would have been nice to have one, but not requuired.

Here are two articles that talk about everything to do with safari photography in a lot more detail - Digital Safari Equipment Tips - Luminous Landscape and Photography in Tanzania  - Fredo Durand

Thanks to Ilya Mirman for answering all of my questions via email all day, you can check out his Ilya's amateur photography on SmugMug.

Update: I'm back!  You can check out my safari photos and see how they turned out.

Gas prices are high.  Demand for gas in the summer usually increases, driving prices up further.  Politicians see this as a big problem.  The solution currently proposed by Hillary Clinton and John McCain?  Let's have a holiday from the gas tax during the summer.  This is an incredibly stupid policy.  It is the craziest policy I have heard in some time.  Not only would this reduce revenue collected by the government by an estimated $9 Billion (we have both a huge federal debt and a budget deficit) but it would also work to increase gas consumption, just the opposite of what is needed.

In fact, today if you search on "gas tax" in Google, John McCain is actually paying for advertisements to promote his views on the gas tax holiday.  Here is an example:

Lucky for him, Obama has not jumped on the bandwagon.  I say he is lucky, because by not being a complete idiot he may have earned my vote. (We have such low standards for political leaders in the US.  Sigh.)

Mike Volpe's Better Solution to the Gas Tax Holiday

• All politicians should have to take (and pass!) an Economics 101 class before being eligible for election to Congress.  Their grade, tests and papers for the class should be posted on the Internet.
• Let's increase the gas taxto reduce consumption of gas - at the federal level we could double the tax (an extra 18 cents a gallon) and raise at least $20 billion per year.
• We should then take the money from the higher gas tax and give it as research grants to companies researching alternative energy and green energy technologies.
• This research will help ensure the US is the world's technological leader in green power.  As oil reserves worldwide dry up, this will work to increase the demand for these technologies which will increase sales for these companies in the US, increasing jobs, decreasing our trade gap and all sorts of other good things for us.

How cool would it be if Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other previously oil rich countries had to purchase solar, wind and battery power technologies from the US?

If we follow the right policies, this could happen in 10-20 years.   Americans should expect better leadership from our next president than short cited policies that make our lives a tiny bit better today but sacrifice so much in the future.

I saw that the Digg folks created a little video so people would know who they were at a local Meet Up. Fun idea, cute song. Check it out.

Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.

I found this video through Twitter, and the comment someone made was that "it must be fun to work at Digg - can I get a job there?" That made me think. Do we need to make a crazy dance video to show people it is fun to work at HubSpot? If we don't, does that mean it is not fun to work here? The answer to both questions is... NO.

Is it not fun to work at HubSpot? No way. We have a BLAST here! I just think we're a bit geekier than the Digg crew. Marketing Geeks. Or Internet Geeks. Or geek bloggers. We would rather debate a product feature or some interesting statistical analysis than lip synch something by the B-52s. We have lots of fun and interesting people - avid Red Sox fans, talented DJs, yoga masters, environmentalists, and animal lovers. A lot of the people at HubSpot are really funnny. Some of the quietest developers can say things that will make the whole room start laughing out loud. We keep a page on our internal Wiki with funny quotes from employees dating back over a year. We have all sorts of internal bets and games and challenges, all aimed at bringing out the best performance of our team. We cherish individuality - in terms of attire, in terms of work schedule, ideas, and more.

But I don't think any of us can dance. Maybe a couple people can. We might even have a funny corporate video some day. But it won't be like this one. Why? Because we're not Digg. We're geekier and more practical. We're across the street from MIT, hardened by Boston winters and have a practical edge to us from the New England Yankee culture. There is no time for dancing here. (Unless the dance video will generate leads and customers.)

If you are willing to work at a company that does not create lip synched dance videos, HubSpot is hiring. Even better if you are a closet marketing geek. We really are a lot of fun. Just in a different way than Digg.

I have always been a big proponent of businesses following entertainers to catch onto new trends in marketing, and I have written some blog articles in the past about the marketing lessons you can learn from rappers and B2B marketing tips from rappers.

Recently, I saw another article on Yahoo showing that 50 Cent has created his own social network, mostly because even though he had a huge success on MySpace, he is unable to get access to the users email addresses or other personal information.

What I find funny about this is not only that 50 Cent has a million fans on MySpace and has also built his own social network, but that he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about his fan base as a strategic asset and how to best manage, grow and monetize that asset.   How many Fortune 500 CEOs think like that?  Very few I'd say.  I think they are still stuck in the world of building new products and sales promotions and channel strategies.  As consumers get more and more control of how they consumer information, I really believe that companies will success or fail based on how they cultivate and enable their biggest fans to communicate with others in the market.  The tools you should be using are blogs, social networks and your own product development.  You can pretty much stop advertising over the next 10-15 years I think.

50 Cent Launches His Own Social Network - What does this mean?

1. 50 Cent has decided that access to his fan's personal info is worth the time and expense of launching his own social network.  This is a very strategic decision.
2. It is pretty easy to launch a social network today.  The hard part is getting members - not a problem for a famous rapper.  You should think about what your social network strategy should be.
3. If social networks like MySpace and Facebook want very famous people (politicians, entertainers, etc.) to use their network, they might have to create some better capabilities for these people to access personal information of their friends/fans/supporters.

It will be interesting to see over time how this battle plays out.  If 50 Cent(or other very popular people) are not on Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace, that decreases the value of these networks to everyone else.  Will the networks make concessions to the famous people?  Will the famous people decide it is OK to lose some control and information access in exchange for a broader audience of people?

I have this annoying problem in IE where it is displaying the wrong favicons (the little icons next to the URL and on the browser tab).  So when I am on Google, it will show the icon for StumbleUpon, or something else.  Evertying else works, but for some reason this really pisses me off.

I found some forums posts about it, but would the geeks at Microsoft just fix the darn problem? 

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6620_102-0.html?forumID=14&threadID=229993&messageID=2383289

 

I have been playing around with some ads on Facebook, and was a bit surprised when I had a couple rejected.  I thought I would republish them here for your enjoyment.  Their policies are rather strict, including "no slang words".  It is funny, because I am just trying to increase the click through rate, which increases their revenue.

"The text of this ad contains excessive or incorrect capitalization. All ads must use appropriate, grammatically correct capitalization. The title of your ad, as well as the first word in each sentence, must begin with a capital letter. Lastly, all proper nouns and acronyms should be capitalized. As per section 4 of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines, all ads should include standard and proper capitalization."

I am giving a presentation on search engine optimization called "SEO 101" for the Boston product Management Association on April 17 in Burlington.  It is a good organization, I've been to a bunch of meetings previously.

If you are interested in SEO and want to meet some sharp marketing folks, come on by.  It's only $15 and you will be getting some good info (if I do say so myself).

Learn more about the $15 SEO 101 Class by Mike Volpe

 

I love MIT.  The man in the video with the grey beard who is holding a computer is Richard Stallman.  While he and I disagree greatly on who owns software and if it is ok to charge people for software, I admire him for doing a better rendition of the Soulja boy dance than I can do.

No comments necessary.  Just watch it.

Marketing has been making a slow progression from art to science over the years. It started when "direct mail" or "database marketing" people began doing direct mail and catalogs and measuring the results. With the advent of the Internet, it became more attractive to be an analytical marketer, as email marketing grew in popularity.  That was probably the birth of "scientific marketing". Now with some technological advances and new understanding of how to leverage the Internet in marketing, there is a growing feeling that pretty much all of marketing should be analytical. But, most marketing people still have questions like:

• Why does sales think all the leads are so crappy?
• How come it is so hard to measure all my different marketing programs?
• How can I use a Blog to better market my company?
• How valuable is my web traffic?
• What do all these web stats actually mean for my business?
• How can I measure social media marketing?

If you have ever felt like this, check out this article about marketing challenges on the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog.  You can also check out this video about closed loop marketing, to learn what you can do to try to be more scientific about your marketing.

Salesforce.com is down.  They have been having trouble all day.  My company is a customer so I know.  Also, see the logs below from their service update website.

It is frustrating to me that their stock was up almost $4 today because of rumors they would sell to Oracle.  Do they really care about the stock price more than customers?

Salesforce.com Down on February 11, 2008

2:04 pm PST : NA5 Service Restored
The Salesforce.com Technology team has restored the service issue with NA5 at 22:11 UTC. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

12:29 pm PST : NA5 Service Degradation
Update # 4: The technology operations team still continues to intensify our analysis to further isolate the intermittent service disruptions. We're sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

11:23 am PST : NA5 Service Degradation
Update # 3: The technology operations team continues to intensify our analysis to further isolate the intermittent service disruptions. Please check back for latest status.

10:19 am PST : NA5 Service Degradation
Update # 2: The technology operations team has intensified our analysis to further isolate the intermittent service disruptions. Please check back for latest status.

9:26 am PST : NA5 Service Degradation
Update #1: The technology operations team continues to isolate the intermittent service disruptions. Batch services for Na5 have been temporary suspended to alleviate the intermittent disruptions.

8:44 am PST : Final EMEA Update # EU (EMEA) Service Restored
UPDATE #3: We have identified a failure of the database and restored services. Root cause messaging will be posted after deeper analysis.

8:22 am PST : NA5 Service Degradation
The technology operations team has been made aware of intermittent service disruptions to NA5. Please check back for further updates.

7:53 am PST : EU (EMEA) Service Degradation
UPDATE #2: We have identified a failure of the database cluster and continue to work on service restoration efforts.

7:02 am PST : NA0 and EU0 Service Degradation
UPDATE #1: Service has been restored for NA0 (SSL) at 1502 UTC.

6:43 am PST : NA0 and EU0 Service Degradation
The technology operations team has been made aware of a possible service impacting issue on NA0 (SSL)and EU (EMEA). Please check back for the latest status.

For those of you who know me personally, you know that this video combines two big elements of my personality.  For more info, you can read this article about rap stars and their marketing techniques and also the follow-up article about rappers and marketing.

For those of you who know me personally, you know that this video combines two big elements of my personality.  For more info, you can read this article about rap stars and their marketing techniques and also the follow-up article about rappers and marketing.

For those of you who know me personally, you know that this video combines two big elements of my personality.  For more info, you can read this article about rap stars and their marketing techniques and also the follow-up article about rappers and marketing.

 

I have thought for a while that Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook Founder and CEO) is certainly a very smart guy for starting Facebook and bringing it to its current level of success.  But I also think he is crazy for not selling at least a portion of his personal holdings - just to take some winnings off the table and make sure he is set for life.  Zuckerberg could do this with about 1% of the company, and still have a gigantic stake in Facebook.

The other thing that I find surprising is that he, and the investors, think he is the best CEO for the company right now.  They have hundreds of employees and are thinking about going public. Now, when I was 23, I certainly thought I was capable enough to lead a huge company through and IPO and manage all of the employees.  But, I was wrong.

4 Reasons Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Hire a New Facebook CEO

1. Mark Zuckerberg will have trouble building a team.  The job of the CEO is to build and hire a great team.  Many really qualified VPs will have trouble working for a 23 year old.  No matter what your knowledge of social networking, there are just larger corporate issues you have zero experience with, and I think being 23 makes it a lot harder to hire a great management team.
2. Mark Zuckerberg will have trouble pleasing Wall Street.  Wall Street (those folks you need to deal with after an IPO) can be hard to please.  One thing that they value is experience and seniority.  The current Facebook CEO has neither.  Having a gray-haired person in charge makes Wall Street feel good, and makes IPOs smoother.
3. Mark Zuckerberg will lose touch with the customer.  Facebook is no longer for college students.  It is growing by over 250,000 users per day, and the biggest demographic is people not in college.  This is a very different audience with very different needs from college students.  One very valuable skill that marketing and product development people hone over many years is the ability to understand customers that are not like themselves.  I do not think a 23 year old can do that.  And it is critically important that the CEO has the pulse of your target market.
4. Mark Zuckerberg has the wrong skills for the next phase of Facebook.  Facebook has crossed the chasm.  It is now going into the mainstream and has well over 60 million members.  Facebook is not about innovation, being scrappy and developing cool new stuff anymore.  Facebook is now about monetizing page views, a proper management structure for growth, and building profits.  Mark is clearly a good founder and startup CEO.  That role almost never overlaps with the roles of a mid-stage growth CEO.

Disclaimer - I have not met Mark Zuckerberg.  I have no idea how truly smart/stupid, mature/childish he really is.  This article is an opinion based on a little work experience and watching an episode of 60 minutes.  And of course, I am also jealous!

For some other commentary on Facebook, see this article about the top 10 Facebook career mistakes and the classic "Cool Wand" Facebook story.

My name is Mike Volpe.  I own www.MikeVolpe.com - I bought the domain in 2000.  Why?  It was clear at that time that the Internet was going to be the future of business and of society, and owning your own name was a good thing.

Today, if you search in Google for "Mike Volpe", my website is listed as the first result, and 4 of the 10 results on the first page have something to do with me.  But, perhaps as a surprise to some people, "Mike Volpe" is a pretty common name.  In fact, there are 121,000 search results in Google for Mike Volpe, including a guy who is apparently a somewhat famous musician.  So, even with all this competition from the other Mike Volpe's, I am still able to be very easily found by people who want to find me - including old friends and business connections.

3 Tips to Manage Your Online Reputation

1. Buy your name as a .com.  If it is available, make sure to buy yourname.com.  Right when I got married and my wife confirmed she was going to change her name, I bought two versions of her new name.  Buying a domain is only about $10 per year.  I would not recommend as much other domain extensions (like .net or .org or .name) because people just don't type them in.
2. Create some content on your website.  Put up a simple website with at least a few pages of content - making sure all the pages are on extensions of the URL you bought. The search engines love original content, no matter what it is, so write a bio about yourself, stories about things you like, whatever.  Just get some content up there associated with your name.
3. Create other content.  You should have profiles on networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, and have content when appropriate on places like YouTube and Flickr (the musician Mike Volpe should have lots of videos on YouTube, for instance - a photographer should have lots of photos on Flickr, etc.)  This content tends to show up in search results (my LinkedIn profile is one the first page of Google, as are blog articles I have written).

Why Managing Your Online Reputation is Important

1. It is better to be found than not found.  While we all sometimes like a degree of privacy, if someone is looking for you, I think it is better if they can find you than not.  it will help you reconnect with people, find jobs and other opportunities and generally increase your reputation.  I would NOT post my home number of address, but having a form where people can email you is a good idea.
2. A strong web presence for you personally is like having a strong professional reputation.  More and more, what you are in the eyes of Google is what you are in the eyes of people.  Especially for someone like me, who works in Internet marketing, if you search for me and can't find me, that really calls my expertise into question.  But increasingly, I think the same is true even if you are a teacher or masseuse.
3. If someone wants to say something bad about you, you can make that content harder to find.  The more content about you on the web, the less likely it is that someone will be able to find potentially bad things about you.  I recently was talking to a friend who had some unflattering things said about them on a blog - generally untrue, by the way - and they asked how they could make it so that when people searched for her name, other people would not see that article.  The only way is to create more content about yourself that ranks higher than the bad stuff, so that people don't find it.

Playboy is missing a huge marketing opportunity on Facebook.  You can think what you want about the company and what they sell.  This article is about marketing only. 

I was surprised to see that one of my 200+ friends became a "fan" of Playboy on Facebook - for those of you not into Facebook yet, I know this because on Facebook you get a news feed of what your friends are up to, and when a friend becomes a fan of something, you get a notification.  Being a fan of a company is sort of like becoming friends with a person.  Companies are starting to create a business page on Facebook (see this article about creating a company or business page on Facebook for free) and then people can become fans.  This allows the company to send messages to the fans and post new information on the page that notifies the fans of changes.

My company, HubSpot, which does Internet marketing, recently created a page on Facebook and we have over 120 fans so far.  Playboy also has a page, and they have over 1700 fans.  Pretty cool.  Except here is the problem.  There is almost nothing on the page.  Playboy, a huge media company - meaning that their job is to publish content - has almost no content on Facebook.  They are very rapidly letting down their 1700 fans.

 

What should Playboy post on Facebook?  Well certainly nothing too "adult", but they could post a bunch of things that would be perfect for Facebook.

How Playboy Should Use Facebook, But Isn't

1. All the Playboy Bunnies should have profiles.  Playboy should help its models maintain Facebook profiles, and they should be fans of Playboy.  They could join under professional names, to maintain their privacy, but allowing the fans to interact with the Playboy bunnies ads a whole level of personal interaction never possible in a mass scale before.  This is a great way to engage your fan base.
2. Add events.Playboy makes a lot of money allowing other brands to use the Playboy brand (Dewars Scotch has thrown "Playboy Parties" in a number of cities before)  What if these events were virtual? Or what if they used Facebook to promote live events?  This could be a powerful way to quickly, cheaply and easily promote events.
3. More photos.  I mean, what really is Playboy without photos.  Of course they don't want to give away stuff they charge for, but all they have posted now is one album with 6 photos.  This is like posting 6 words from an entire set of encyclopedias.  Post some more photos!!!  You probably have a trillion photos in your archives.   
4. Develop a Facebook App.  By developing an application, Playboy could further engage the Facebook community. There are lots of ideas for a Facebook App for Playboy - voting for your favorite Playboy bunny, something interactive that helped you live the Playboy lifestyle, some way to interact with Hugh Hefner.  Lots of ideas, so little time.

I hope this article has given people at companies besides Playboy some ideas of how they can use Facebook for marketing.  And, I also hope it makes you think about launching something before you are ready when it can disappoint over a thousand of your fans.

Finally, if anyone from Playboy is reading this and would like to hire me as a consultant to talk through more details on what you should be doing on Facebook, contact me using the contact form at http://www.mikevolpe.com/

Here are two links to good viral marketing articles:

1. An article I wrote on the HubSpot blog about Viral Marketing - it also has links to some other resources
2. A great article on viral marketing on Read Write Web with a really thoughful analysis

 

Crazy, but for at least the last 5 minutes I have been trying to get to the Compete.com traffic ranking service and it has been down.  Surprising... these guys are good and know what they are doing!

I think also shows how impatient we have become in the Internet era.

UPDATE - they are still down at 1:30pm - at least an hour and a half so far...

We all know that Facebook is a powerful marketing tool.  It is also a dangerous tool if you are not smart about how you use it, and you can make some big mistakes on Facebook.

One of the blog articles I wrote has been selected as a SEMMY nominee in the social media category.

The original blog article was on the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog and was called: 10 Secrets to Marketing with Social News Sites - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and more.

On the HubSpot marketing blog today someone called me a "Marketing Jinn" because in the Muslim culture there are three types of entities: humans, angels and jinns, which have special powers and are made of a smoke-like substance.  He said he really enjoyed reading my blog articles and all the marketing insights and therefore called me a "Marketing Jinn".

I forwarded the comment to one of our software developers who lives in Egypt, and he confirmed that Jinn "is an Arabian world, its means ghost in English, in Arab worlds we use this to describe a person who has a great talent in some field - since a Jinn isn't a human they have special talents and are able to do things humans can not do."  "Since you have the greatest talent in marketing I have ever seen, I would join him in calling you a Marketing Jinn."

Needless to say I am flattered by the compliments!  I will need to change the title on my business card to Marketing Jinn.

I seem to get this question a lot.  Here is an email I sent to a group of which I am a member, answering this question.  Normally I would post something like this on the main blog I write, the HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog, but this was a bit too self promotional, so I don't think I will do that.

Which Blog Software will be Best for my Business?

Dear ______ -

Your question inspired me to do some thinking and writing.  Here is a thorough review of the topic of blogging for business.  If topics like this interest you, you should subscribe this blog - http://blog.hubspot.com/ - I write about topics like this all the time, and its free.

Great reasons to use a blog for business:

1. A blog helps personalize your business, helping prospects and customers get to know you better
2. A blog help you get found by more prospects in search engines (SEO), if you set up your blog properly
3. A blog helps you get found by more prospects in the blogosphere, if you set up your blog properly
4. A blog helps you get found by more prospects in social media (Digg, Facebook), if you use your blog properly
5. A blog can be a good lead nurturing tool, maintaining contact with prospects until they are ready to buy

To accomplish these goals, there are some "must-have" features with blogs:

Blog functionality:

1. Uses your own business URL, not a free subdomain of someone else's URL
2. Allows subscriptions by email and RSS
3. Automatically integrates with social media (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon,etc.)
4. Automatically send new blog posts to your subscribers by email, and lets you import old lists of subscribers
5. Automatically integrates with social media sites (Digg, StubleUpon, etc.)

Analytics functionality:

1. Allows you to track both email and RSS subscribers over time
2. Ability to measure visitors and leads from your blog
3. Ability to measure your rank for important search terms in search engines
4. Ability to track and measure your competition as compared to you

Support and expertise:

1. Has support people that answer technical / support questions
2. Has people, articles and videos that teach you how to be successful with your blog (not support, but marketing expertise)

Here are the three suggested paths to blogging based on price:

1. OK/Cheapest ($10-$50/month): Template using Wordpress or Typepad. With some technical knowledge and advice from people in forums, you can set up a blog with some (but not all) of the features above. To get more of the features you can integrate things like Feedburner, Google Analytics, maybe Constant Contact, widgets from the social media websites and more - this takes some technical know-how in my opinion.
2. Better/Mid-Range (~$250/month): HubSpot - You get all of the functionality I mention above, including training and advice from experts so you can be more successful with your blog. This requires zero technical knowledge. Also included is an SEO system, analytics, competitive tracking and lead tracking.
3. Best/Expensive ($3K-10K+, plus monthly hosting): A custom blog system from a web design firm. A web design firm can build you a custom blog (FYI, they will probably use Wordpress to power it) including whatever features you want, and they will integrate any system or features you want (like Google Analytics, HubSpot, lead tracking tools, SEO tools, etc.). This will always meet your needs exactly because a good firm will figure out your needs and built to that. But make sure to ask them for examples of clients who are successful with their blogs - and make them show you the number of comments, Technorati rank, traffic and search engine results to prove it. You should then as the client if the web design firm actually helped make them successful with advice, training and marketing expertise, or if they just built a good technology platform.

Small Business Blogging Case Study (with Videos):

Note - since I know HubSpot best, yes this is a HubSpot customer - ignore this if you think it is too promotional.  But even if you ignore every time he says the word HubSpot, I think it is still a valuable case study to show the power of business blogging. Business Blog Case Study

Biggest mistake made by business blogs:

Hosting your blog on a Blogspot or Typepad or other free URL.  Just like you should not use a hotmail email address or your home mailing address for your business, you should not host your business blog on  Not only is this a bad idea for branding reasons, but if your blog is successful, it is impossible to move it anywhere else some number of months down the road if it is not on a URL you won and control.  In fact, using a free Blog URL is WORSE than using a free email address or mailing address, since both mail and email can be forwarded to a new address.  You cannot forward a blog from a Free URL to a new one - this is super important to know.  This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when you start blogging.  Just trust me, your blog should be on a URL you own and control.  I have made this mistake myself.  You can use software from Blogger or Typepad if you want to, just make SURE each article you write has a URL like "www.yourcompany.com/article1" or "blog.yourcompany.com/article1" - do not do something like "yourcompany.blogspot.com/article1" or "yourcompany.typepad.com/article1").

Feel free to contact me with any other blogging questions.  I have been blogging for a while now, and my current blog has been on the home page of Digg and other social media sites, has thousands of subscribers and gets tens of thousands of visitors per month.

Thanks,
Mike