A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a young pest control professional who wanted to start his own business.

"I’m thinking of going into business for myself, but it’s already a saturated market." I asked about the marketing research that proved his point. "The Yellow Pages are full of exterminators."

Guess what my advice was…(Think Blog)

First stop, search the Technorati blog directory. Only six blogs have "pest control" tagged as a theme for their site. The only current site is actually a sales letter. However, searching all blog posts for "pest control", we find 27,527 posts about the subject, including this one from the MetaFilter Community Weblog: It Feels Like They’re on me Right Now.

In fact, people talk about "pest control" quite a bit. From Technorati’s results:

English posts that contain Pest Control per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Next stop, Google’s Blog Search for "pest control" shows about 6,300 posts. Still not finding an exterminator.

We scoot over to the iBlog Business Directory and search for "pest control" – still nothing.

Toby Bloomberg shows us a bit of a rescue with RESCUE! BugBlog

I’d say it’s a wide open market for someone that wants to be found.

Flickr photo by catmadogma

Let’s be honest. Some of us need to diet and won’t admit it. Some of us are nutrition freaks – and it’s going to kill us.

Some fats promote our health. Some fats increase the risk to our health.

They say that commercially packaged products are often loaded with trans fatty acids (a bad fat). Too many saturated fats can lead to health risks.

Web sites are often commercially packaged (Is that design actually a template purchased for $50? And they resold it to you for how much?). They come saturated with keywords which look great in a density cloud ("Your keyword appears 14% on each page"), but humans can’t read it.

Blogs are more organic, they grow naturally – in voice, in readership, and in search rankings. What? Search Rankings aren’t important?

Let’s be honest. You want to be findable, right? No? What’s with that half-page Yellow Book ad? Ah, yes…so people can…yep, thought so….find you.

Blogs are Good FAT, because they promote:

• Findability: Customers find you, you find them
• Affordability: It’s laughable when you compare – and yes, blogware can produce everything your dreamweavergolivefrontpagewhateverwysiwyg thing can.
• Trust: Its not a bad word. People misuse it. Truth always bubbles to the top over time.

How healthy is your Web Presence?

There are many ways (besides Flash) to put some dynamics into your static web pages.

One way is with FilmLoop (an angel told me about it). We’re using FilmLoop on a teaser page for FoundThings – a great little boutique in the Des Moines East Village – until we build out the blog site.

Or, you could put a video on YouTube, like we did at Benra Sales. The best thing about YouTube is it’s easy for your viewers to pass it on to others.

Another way is to use FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost, which takes the headlines from your blog and allows you to place them on a static web page. As an example, I’ve done this at CopywritingWatch – an archive of my previous blog efforts.

These aren’t all of them by any stretch. What tools do you use as a static guard for your web site?

As an update to my previous post (and I’ll stand by what’s written), I will no longer be suggesting Bloglines as an alternative aggregator – until they fix a big problem.

I just tried to subscribe to this blog via Bloglines. Four choices came up (even though it’s all the same feed from FeedBurner- and my code only points to this feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Converstations.

I’ll need to find a different solution if Bloglines makes subscribing so difficult. Hope I can find one in time for tomorrow’s workshop. Thankfully, only 30+% of our subscribers use Bloglines.

In Dancing: "Heel-Ball-Toe, Heel-Ball-Toe."
In Blogging: "Type-Link-Publish, Type-Link-Publish."

If you’re not yet in the rhythm of blogging frequently, the best way to start – is to start now.

I know, you’re agonizing over every word. You’re wondering if people will like what you have to say. Will it get picked up by the A-List? Or Digg?

Frankly, if you’re blogging as an extension of your business – that’s not important unless your target customer base IS the A-List.

Forget trying to post a prize-winning journal entry, just say something. If we were sitting down at your desk, we wouldn’t just stare at each other – I’d soon leave.

Look at Darren Rowse‘s recent project, Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers. What was the No. 1 habit? Posting Frequently.

Tom Vander Well recently posted about CSRs getting a rhythm (emphasis mine):

"When CSRs are on the phone taking call after call it allows them to get into a rhythm. You’re sharp, you’re crankin’, you’re on your game as the calls keep coming. When things are slow, CSRs are often focused on other things."

How do you battle blogging inertia? Ah-one, and ah-two…

We used to manage a large piece of property right down the street from a McDonald’s and Taco Bell. On the other side of us was a large theater complex. Multitasker that I am, each morning I would walk our dog and pick-up the trash left behind. Litter happens offline.

Maybe your blog is getting the online version of litter – spam comments. In some ways, that’s a sign that you’ve arrived. it happens to everyone eventually. So multitask. When you check your stats or write a new post, pick up the trash (spam). Spam happens online.

Maybe you’re looking for a way to stop – or at least slow down – spam. Make sure the fence you build doesn’t also keep out comments.

Ed Kohler shares How to Combat Blog Spam with some good suggestions in the post and in the comments, including information on CAPTCHA.

I’ve heard great things about the Akismet plug-in, though I don’t use it myself. Akismet is available for WordPress (here) or MovableType 3.2 or higher (here under "Other…").

What techniques do you have to battle the online litterbugs?

Photo on Flickr by Kevin "The Rocketeer" Trotman