We all know about the issue of spamming. Every single email address in the world is spammed at some stage, whether it’s with adverts for Viagra, or for a bigger phallus, or to buy a Harvard MBA. They’re nothing new. But it seems there’s a new kid in town, a slightly less irritating email, not quite spam, but not quite regular email either. If it hasn’t already hit your inbox, it soon will. It’s bacn!

So what is this I hear you say? The best way to explain is to watch this video below from the founders of the bacn community.

If you don’t have the time to watch the clip, then essentially it’s all those emails you receive that aren’t spam, but that you simply don’t have the time to read anyway. For example Facebook or Twitter notifications, e-newsletters, or even blog feed subscriptions. These emails can basically clog up your inbox but, unlike spam, you’re responsible for requesting these emails.

As an internet marketer or blogger then, what can you do to stop bacning people?

First of all make sure you don’t email your list too frequently. This is not only important for getting your message across, but also for reducing unsubscribes and spam complaints. The ideal frequency will vary depending on your niche and the best way to measure this is to test some different frequencies and measure the impact on your results and subscriber numbers.

Secondly, manage your RSS feeds better. I don’t know if this is possible with Feedburner but set it up for weekly updates rather than daily. This way subscribers will receive more stories/posts in one email, rather than an email for every post.

A third idea is to check out the bacn community forum for more ideas.

Feel free to share your bacning experiences in the comments.

Reading the FT at the weekend I came across two really interesting pieces in the ‘Finance Corner’ which I wanted to share with you.

The first was about the lack of market research being done by small firms in their new business development work. Apparently in the UK “one man bands” spend on average £1,100 a year ($2200 approx) on sales and marketing with an average spend of UK business overall of £28,000*. However less than half do any kind of research into prospective customers such as checking out websites or researching key personnel.

This seems almost hard to believe, especially in this day and age with information being so readily available on the Internet. For every single new business prospect I acquire the first place I head to is Google. It’s amazing what information is available on the internet and it’s even more amazing how much this can help your sales.

The second story was about how fathers are hugely influential in inspiring their off spring to become entrepreneurs, even more so than mothers - who the article says are more likely to want to talk about their business and entrepreneurial experiences. However the research ** also found that:

students in the USA are found to be more likely to have a larger number of role models and more enthusiasm for the idea of becoming an entrepreneur.

Are role models part of the reason why so many world class businesses and products emerge in the States then? Maybe there is some value then in reading those books about Donald Trump, Jack Welch and co then… (although I have to say I’m a little biased towards reading about great British entrepreneurs such as Sir Richard Branson and Dame Anita Roddick)

* Research completed by Marketsafe and published by the Financial Times on Sept 22/23 2007.
** Research completed by Lancaster University Management School and published by the Financial Times on Sept 22/23 2007.

If you haven’t seen the Bloggers Choice Awards yet, now is the time to check them out. The awards are designed to reward the efforts put in by bloggers to provide interesting, valuable, funny, entertaining and down right ridiculous content on their blogs. They are here to show who is making an impact in the blogosphere, with numerous categories for all of the different types of blog out there. The most interesting of which, for me at least anyway, is the category of Best Marketing Blog.

If you check out this category you’ll see that as of today (18th September) there are over 750 blogs currently nominated, a number that will inevitably grow before the closing date of October 19th. You won’t be surprised by some of the top placed blogs at the moment, for example the excellent Copyblogger is up there at the top of the list, along with other high profile blogs like Seth Godin, Marketinghipster and a handful of others all with multiple nominations. I was surprised to find the mighty Ducttapemarketing sitting on a lowly two nominations.

But what I wanted to do was to look at the “marketing blog long tail” i.e. the many hundreds of well written bogs, with great content, but that haven’t received many or possibly any nominations at all. So I’m going to look at a handful of these “long tail” blogs with zero nominations and pick out a few you should read and possibly vote for.

So today I’m going to start with Sticky Figure.

This blog is currently languishing on page 83 out of 86 of the nominations with no votes. I was pulled in by the name of the blog and found the content to be well written and with some insightful advice for small business marketers. It’s a blog about making an impact but author - Steve Woodruff - also writes about his personal life.

The reason for highlighting this blog is mainly because of Steve’s association with the Branding Wire blog and an excellent case study for how to develop the brand of an IT services company. Nice work Steve. Oh and there’s an interesting crit of some branding that may be interesting to those currently working on logos, tag lines etc. I should also mention the Pageflakes Pagecast Steve’s setup that provides a host of excellent RSS feeds for everything in marketing (and is very similar to something I’m working on in Squidoo).

On to the next unsung hero then and the last for today - White Board Diaries .

This one instantly impresses with the choice of theme, the rather smart Subtle theme from Frazier Media. Of course that’s no reason to vote for a blog, the content is much more important. With White Board Diaries it seems the blog owner Ben Kelly has taken to the concept of conversation marketing, the idea that as marketers we are responsible for encouraging conversations between companies and their target customers. A nice concept and one that as a blogger I can really grasp, after all, every blogger strives for reader engagement. This is also something I see as a key component in the success of many of my clients, those who actually engage and listen to their clients. Ben writes some interesting strategy content also, for example his post on customers being more than just statistics.

Ben - looks like you could do with sorting out your permalink structure though..

OK enough rambling from me. Go and read these blogs and of course vote for them in the Bloggers Choice Awards. By the way you’ll see a badge in the sidebar that shows I have been nominated for an award so don’t be afraid to vote for me…..

Like most bloggers I’m constantly on the look out for new ways to bring in more traffic to my blog. I’ve been doing pretty well recently and my visitor numbers have more than trebled in recent weeks, which is nice. Although to be honest it has taken quite a lot of hard work. So I was pleased to come across a new widget called BlogRush that promises traffic without the work - is there such a thing as a free lunch I hear you ask…?

So with nothing to lose except a small amount of time (it takes less than 5 minutes to setup) and perhaps a little traffic I’ve decided to give it a go. If you scroll down this page you will see the widget displayed in my rand hand sidebar beneath the Blogroll.

Essentially it acts like a traffic exchange in that you tell BlogRush what you write about and it displays links to other relevant blog posts in the widget on your site. So how does this bring in traffic I hear you ask, surely it just diverts traffic away from your blog?

Well yes, inevitably it does take some traffic away, but here’s how it works. If your blog receives 100 page views today, then links to posts in your site will be displayed in the BlogRush widget on 100 other blogs, so in other words, there will be 100 other sources of traffic to your blog. The best bit is that the other blogs will all be on related topics, so if your blog is about scuba diving, your links will appear on other blogs about scuba. This means you will be reaching a very well targeted audience.

There are other advantages too, but I’ll leave the excellent video on the BlogRush site to explain these to you. Essentially by placing a little widget in your sidebar (and to be fair, it’s not too bad looking either) you can increase you exposure to targeted audiences whilst at the same time driving more traffic to your blog. Nice.

Oh and did I mention it’s completely FREE so you may as well give it a go!!

By the way, I’ll soon be publishing a handful of the quality articles and ebooks I’ve used to help me to increase my traffic levels by over 300% so don’t forget to come back soon for these. More than likely I’ll be giving these away for FREE too.