Reaching for your wallet? You might just have read a blog article.

On Tuesday, BuzzLogic released a report called Harnessing the Power of Blogs which concludes that the blogosphere has more power than online social networks when it comes to shaping consumer buying decisions.

The report analyzes the results of a survey, conducted by JupiterResearch and sponsored by BuzzLogic, that asked 2,210 online consumers in the US about the ways in which different kinds of websites influenced their purchasing choices.

One conclusion of the survey: “Frequent” blog readers - that is, those who read blogs once or more each month - actually depend more on blogs to find other blog content than on any search engine.

Another interesting find: the number of people who read at least one blog a month has quadrupled since 2004. read more

Nearly half of all US bloggers have written about a health-related topic at least once, and three in five of those write primarily on the subject, according to new research by Envision Solutions, a healthcare marketing communications consultant. According to my math, that’s almost one in three bloggers that claim health topics as a niche for their blog.

A few interesting statistics to come out of the report:

• Numbers: Over 13 million Americans wrote at least one health-related post in the seven months between February and August 2008.
• Diversity: Nearly three in five health bloggers are female, and nearly two in five are either African-American or Hispanic.
• Age: Half of all health bloggers are aged between 18 and 34.
• Motivation: A third of those surveyed said that they blogged to educate others, while one in five did so primarily to market themselves or their services. 10% were trying to advance a cause, and 7% were using the blog as some kind of self-help for their medical condition.

There seemed to be an increase in the commercialization of blogs, with 46% of healthcare marketing professionals claiming to have been contacted by the PR company for a product or service, up from 29% in 2006, while over a third said they had placed ads on their site, up from just over a quarter two years ago. read more

Recently, I wrote a series of articles offering tips and suggestions on a variety of research resources to help bloggers blog better. I’ve also written up many sources for blog content ideas.

In the early days of web publishing, the Slashdot Effect could bring a site to its knees, as Slashdot was a source for inspiration and news. This was replaced by the Digg Effect and Technorati Tag, as people turned to these sites for sources of information. For the past few years, many have relied upon their feeds, Techmeme, Wired, and now Twitter as resources for getting answers as well as finding blog story ideas. What’s next?

The evolution of how writers find subjects to write about moving towards today’s web writer and blogger has always been one of fascinations. Where do stories come from? Where and how do you do your research? So many years doing this from pen and paper to typewriter to computer to web, and the questions are the same.

Are you asked where your inspiration for blogging comes from? What do you tell your friends and family when they ask?

The spark of an idea can come from anywhere, but the follow through to finished article or blog post is a mystery to so many. Share with us how you turn that spark into a blog post, and where you find your story ideas online.

Starting next week on Lorelle on WordPress, I will be sharing my blog resources with my readers. Your blog resources are the sites you visit frequently that help you blog. They are the bookmarks in your browser. The feeds in your feed reader.

While preparing my huge list of blog resources, I made some interesting discoveries about how I blog, what I blog about, and what resources I return to regularly for inspiration and fact checking.

I’ve been blogging for 14 years and have accumulated a huge wealth of resources. Over the years, the list has changed as some sites have come and gone, or new and improved resources replaced them on my lists. Some have stayed on the list, which is also surprising, considering how fast things change on the web.
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In the past two years I’ve read many thought provoking articles on blogging. Unfortunately many of these articles are hidden behind the great academic firewall. Researcher and blogger danah boyd explains how and why many academic articles are behind “heavy iron walls” in her blog post ‘open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals.‘

While subscription fees may keep academic journals going it prevents interesting articles from circulating widely and circulation creates discussion. Fortunately there are also many great research articles out there in the open. I’d like to share three pieces that changed the way I think about blogs.

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Earlier this week, I introduced you to the Clusty search engine, with tips on how it can be used to brainstorm and research blog content. Today, I want to showcase the KWMap, a visual keyword map search engine.

KWMap is different as it graphically charts out relationships to your search term or phrase. It’s invaluable for exploring those relationships for brainstorming and research, giving you a new perspective on your search.
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Google is not the end all and be all of search engines. There are actually some better and more efficient search engines out there, and there are different types of search engines worthy of your attention. Especially when it comes to researching and writing blog content.

Clusty is a cluster search engine. Carnegie Mellon computer science researchers began researching search clusters in the 1990s and eventually brought the first “high-quality text clustering search engine” online through Vivisimo in 2000. The idea behind clustering is to gather related information into groups or folders, thus directing the searcher to more specific information rather than just a big list. The result eventually became Clusty.

Wikipedia describes cluster analysis as:
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When the international Olympic Games begin, everyone has an opinion on who will win, who should have won, and anything and everything Olympic. As the Olympic Games get closer, I thought I’d research some information to help you blog about the upcoming games in China.

There are a lot of stories and angles to be found on the Olympic Games, from historical perspectives and comparisons to personal interest stories such as the impact of the games on the communities in which they are held, and how the infrastructure and changes brought about by the games help or hinder the community years later. If you are looking for Olympic material for your blog, think about local human interest stories such as a community member who was in the Olympics or traveled to see the Olympics and get their inside story. The Olympics impacts everyone everywhere, so there is an Olympic story around every corner.

The official sites for the upcoming Olympic Games include:
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The question of how many blogs are out there is currently buzzing in my e-mail inbox and in my (Dutch) feed list. Why do we even care about the total number of blogs? Carl Bialik from the The Wall Street Journal explained it as follows in 2005:

First, let’s step back and consider why we’re counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are. But blogs are still in the process of entering mainstream consciousness, so numerical credibility is important; bloggers themselves cite the statistics a lot.

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The Blog Squad surveyed a number of business professionals who had abandoned or lost interest in their blogs, to find out the key reasons they felt the blog had failed.

The top five reasons given were:

1. Not enough comments were left by visitors

2. Not enough subscribers

3. No increase in traffic to their main website

4. Difficult to come up with fresh new content for the blog every week

5. Couldn’t work out how to promote products and services via the blog

The Blog Squad put such “failure” down to a lack of training in four key business blogging areas: Content, Outreach, Design, and Action. Yes, that does spell out CODA.

Denise Wakeman said, “Many professionals simply don’t know how to use the features of their blogging platform. Furthermore, they often struggle with what to write about on a business blog. So their posts are infrequent, their traffic stagnant, and they don’t convert readers to clients.”

They reckon that over half of all business blogs are abandoned within three months, and unsurprisingly they reckon they can train businesspeople to establish a more effective blog through teleseminar training this month.

More fundamental, as far as I’m concerned, is that blogging just isn’t for everyone.

While I believe that most businesses today benefit from a web presence, I don’t believe that they all need to blog.

If you’ve nothing to say, and you’re developing better customer relationships and conversions using more traditional methods, then don’t take resources away from that simply because “blogging” is the new buzzword.

Bear in mind, too, that there are plenty of “experts” around who’ll claim to fix your blog in four weeks. It’s not (usually) that simple.