Marcus Geduld’s book After Effects Expressions from Focal Press is, at 400+ pages, a comprehensive resource for anyone wanting to become an expert at this oft underused feature of Adobe’s flagship animation product. If you know After Effects but have always wondered about the power one can wield with expressions, definitely check this book out. If you know JavaScript and want to know how you can apply those skills to working in After Effects, there’s something here for you as well.

Built on a subset of JavaScript with After Effects-specific additions thrown in by Adobe, expressions allow precise script-based control of composition layers, properties and keyframes. Possibilities include simple transformation properties like scale or rotation and enabling layers (and their properties) to behave in complex ways that would often take hours of keyframing. Expressions have been a feature of many After Effects books since they were introduced in version 6.0 of the program, but to date I have yet to see a book solely dedicated to them. Geduld’s book does a great job explaining all the possibilities (and limitations) expressions have to offer in a friendly way that’s easy to understand.

If you already know JavaScript, some of this book might be rudimentary review for you. But for those of us who aren’t programmers by trade, section one of the book offers easy to understand primers on the anatomy of a script and other expression basics such as variables, arrays and so on as they specifically relate to the familiar tools in After Effects. For the seasoned JavaScript programmer, section two lays a foundation for more mathematically complex features such as loops, randomness, triggers and user-defined functions. Multiple tutorials are included in each chapter and project files for all the book’s lessons are available to download.

Geduld’s writing is playful and fun while still maintaining authority over the subject matter and hundreds of full-color screen grabs, illustrations and script examples make the lessons an easy study. After Effects Expressions offers a comprehensive resource guide that fills a niche like nothing else currently on the market. If you would like to add expressions to your bag of design and development tricks, this book comes highly recommended.

Small Giants outlines a refreshing trend of what its author calls ‘a new class of great companies’ who have consciously chosen a way of business that embraces notions of profitability and in some cases employee profit sharing while maintaining an equal focus on other non-financial priorities such as community service, being the best at what you do, embracing life/work balance, and creating a great place to work. By remaining privately owned and thus not beholden to the bottom line needs of shareholders, these companies have replaced the rapid growth cycle so common in corporate America with a set of characteristics that makes them truly unique in today’s business landscape. These are what Bo Burlingham refers to as small giants.

Each small giant, he purports, has a certain mojo that helps define it as such. What makes up that mojo differs from company to company but recurring characteristics tend to be a strong commitment to employees, community service, charity, life/work balance, flexible rules and regulations, and a general open book policy about management. The businesses profiled have incorporated different practices into the fabric of their respective company cultures but the end result is a trend of happiness and fulfillment in the workplace for all involved, a community that respects them, and committed employees who stay on for the long haul. Each of these elements contribute to the organization’s overall long-term success and the mojo of which Burlingham speaks.

Unique Approaches
The case studies range from companies as small as a single person to those with thousands of employees. Some companies, like Righteous Babe Records, Anchor Brewing or Clif Bar & Co., are product-focused while others, such as CitiStorage, or Chicago’s own The Goltz Group, owners of Artist’s Frame Service on Clybourn, offer services to their clientele. Each company’s approach to business is unique, their structures differ wildly from one to the next, and they couldn’t be more divergent in terms of what they sell, but all maintain a commitment to the communities in which they do business as well a razor-sharp focus on customer satisfaction and building long-term relationships with their clients.

Going Public
Another thing that all these companies have in common is that they have consciously decided against going public. They have rejected opportunities for expansion and profit in exchange for freedom and control. For some that decision was fraught with difficulties. Gary Erickson of Clif Bar & Co. was offered $120 million by a “midwestern food conglomerate” that some have identified as Quaker Oats in early 2000. On the day of the deal he backed out in the name of independence and ended up having to pay his then partner $65 million over five years at a time when he had only $100,000.00 in his bank account. Yet somehow in an atmosphere giant food conglomerates out to crush it, Clif Bar & Co. more than doubled its sales to $92 million in just a few years without taking on any outside investors or expanding its workforce. For Erickson and others in the book, decisions like these, difficult though they may be, are well worth it.

“In business, after all, it’s easy to confuse size with greatness,” Burlingham says, “and getting bigger and getter better. When you stop and think about it, the connections between the two are tenuous at best, but--with all the attention paid to getting big and growing fast--it’s easy to understand why most of us tend to equate them. By deciding to go for greatness rather than bigness, the small giants remind us that the two are not the same...”

Required Reading
This book should be required reading for any would-be entrepreneur, small business employee or MBA student. Though I am a business owner, I don’t often get excited about reading purely business-related books. In my off-time I’d much prefer to read about design trends or learn a new After Effects or Flash technique, or better yet dive into a good novel or short story collection (it’s that life/work balance thing). Small Giants is a notable exception, however, one that has reinvigorated my aspirations for both life and work and helped me reconsider what I want out of each.

Barack Obama said in his presidential acceptance speech “Let us remember that, if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers.” Companies like those outlined in Small Giants have already taken a massive leap forward in making this statement a reality. I hope that I can as well.

It seems like everybody and their mother is writing some kind of article about CS4. Being that I’m particularly susceptible to peer pressure, I’ve decided to chime in as well. Yes, I’m half lemming. No, I do not prize my individuality. Yes, I would jump off a bridge if my friends did too. Just like in Lost Boys. So sue me.

I come from a mostly video background, and so the big Adobe releases don’t usually get me as excited as, say, a new version of Final Cut Pro might. That said, at least half of my work day seems grasped tightly in an Adobe headlock. Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator… I can scarcely imagine a workflow without them now. But I have never really taken Premiere seriously, and I don’t think I’m the only one. This edition comes with the new ability to use blend modes for overlapping footage, which is nifty but not unique among editing suites, and you can have multiple video standards (SD and HD in the same project for instance) which is just par for the course nowadays. The further new addition of being able to scrub audio tracks is neat but not really that useful. I’ve always found the idea of editing in an Adobe environment interesting, though, especially when it comes to something like importing Photoshop lower thirds.

After Effects is a great program, and there were so many new additions in the last release, I was not at all surprised to see that the CS4 version has mostly functionality improvements rather than crazy new tools. Though I am totally going to use that new Cartoon effect as soon as I get the chance. Encore seems fine and all, but I know DVD Studio Pro a lot better at this point, and why change? Fireworks is useful for prototyping, surely, but I’m more of a dive-right-in-and-make-it kind of guy. And as a musician, Soundbooth always seemed like a mysterious Tron-like throwback, a sound editor from a previous era when home computers were brand-spankin’-new and teased hair was in. (Cue any Frankie Goes to Hollywood song here).

That said, this release has only truly changed my mind about one of the programs out there, and it’s Soundbooth. It still looks a little Tron-tastic to me. Something about that green sound wave doesn’t look quite right. But the functionality is superb, the controls are powerful and intuitive, and it’s one of the best mastering tools I’ve found to date.

Regarding the controls, let’s begin with the way you build fades. I’ve never seen such a seamless and simple way to do something that practically every other audio editor I’ve seen makes complicated mince-meat out of. There’s a little “fade” button in the interface. You tap that. Yep, it’s that easy. If you want to finesse the fade, you just drag it how you want it to go. Couldn’t be simpler, and it works like a charm. Instead of putting in a dozen anchor points and building a shape, it just bends the fade as you drag it, and it works just the way you hope it would.

Now, audio mastering is generally considered to be half technology, half voodoo. If you have any doubt about the voodoo part, ask any mastering engineer about the “pixie dust” and “sparkle” that they add to tracks. Both of these are common terms used in mastering, and they help illustrate the Fantasy Island-style wizardry involved. Essentially, you’re manipulating compression, limiting, EQ, reverb and gain (and occasionally gates and other effects) to make your finished tracks sound their best, but there is no single way of doing it. It’s a unique process every time, and when it’s done correctly, the difference is spectacular.

In the home studio, my experience is that it’s incredibly easy to overdo it and screw up a bunch of perfectly good tracks. I’ve done it many times. But with Soundbooth, the built in mastering suite of effects does a wonderful job of laying out the tools you need, and while it’s possible to overdo it, the way it is set up helps you to avoid going overboard. I found the tools to be very high quality, and the results to be fantastic.

The settings on the Exciter, for instance (Tube, Tape, Retro...) got me very… well...excited! And they sound great without being too over the top. The compression is flexible enough to squeeze your track into a bar of musical steel, or gently lift your quieter moments into the mix, and the visual EQ is easy and intuitive to work with. And having controls to simply make your track louder without clipping to start with is just great. 

So I’m happy to live with the green sound wave and the slightly retro layout, as long as the mastered tracks keep coming out so well. I’ve been hoping for a mastering tool this easy to use and effective for a while, and I have to say I’m a little stunned that it ended up coming from Adobe rather than one of the musical mainstays out there. Now I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that the new Flash, which I haven’t had an opportunity to try out yet, is as cool as it looks like it is! 3D?! Hoo ha!

Tactic:
Use online tools like TubeMogul or blip.tv to easily distribute your video content across multiple community-based video sharing sites.

Why It Works:
These sites make it easy for users to distribute content to a variety of destinations with just a few clicks. As long as you have accounts with the supported partner sites uploading a video and distributing it is a simple and painless process that involves filling in a few forms and clicking the upload button. Once the video has been distributed you can track hit counts and follow metrics data in one convenient location.

The most time consuming aspect of using these sites is the fact that you need to sign up for accounts with all the sites they support. Though time-consuming, it’s also an important step to make sure your video content is relevant to the site’s mission. For instance, do you really want your educational video on StupidVideos.com? Once registration is out of the way, the tools these sites offer are simple and straightforward. Blip.tv allows you to bring your blog(s) into the fray and features a Windows/Mac desktop application as well.

TubeMogul works best with Quicktime movies or MPEG-4 video content that use MP3-encoded audio and have a 700-1500 Kbps data rate. Just a word of caution: we have run into a couple situations where we unknowingly used an unsupported audio codec in our MPEG-4 videos and the distributed content appeared on a number of sites without any audio. Though distributing video content via TubeMogul is easy, we have found that removing content from all member sites is not supported, thus forcing us to change our video settings and content on each individual sharing site. Perhaps that might be a good feature request for future versions of the product.

Distribution via TubeMogul and blip.tv also greatly increases search engine results. The simple act of uploading our demo reel gave us several additional pages of results based on the tags we included with each video. Plus, some of these sites aggregate their video content to other sites via RSS, adding even more results to the mix. Best of all, a basic account is free and upgrades are available to those who require more robust reporting and metrics data.

Resources:
As of this writing, TubeMogul supports twenty-one video sharing sites. Blip.tv supports twenty-two, plus the built-in ability to custom skin your content and share it via your blog(s). A complete breakdown is as follows:

TubeMogul:
AOL Video
Blip.tv
Break
Brightcove
Crackle
Daily Motion
Google Video
Graspr (instructional video network)
Howcast (how-to videos)
Imeem (music site with video sharing)
Metacafe
MySpace
Revver
Sclipo (social learning network)
StupidVideos
Veoh
Yahoo! Video
YouTube
Viddler
Vimeo
5min (quick instructional videos)

Blip.tv
iTunes
Internet Archive (content must have a Creative Commons license)
del.icio.us
Flickr
Adobe Media Player
Slide
Akimbo (video-on-demand system)
FeedBurner (video feeds via RSS)
MySpace
Twitter (Auto-Tweets your Twitter account every time you upload a video)
Facebook
Yahoo! Video
AOL Video
Lycos Mix
MeeVee
Mefeedia
Meebo
Blinkx
SplashCast
blip.tv Channels (various channels on the blip.tv network)
Pando

As you can see from the above lists, with a few exceptions each site distributes your video content to a variety of different sites, so it’s worthwhile to have accounts with each.

How We Have Embraced It:
When we finished our latest video and animation demo reel in June ‘08 we used TubeMogul to distribute it and received significant traffic increases and search engine results because of it. We did the same for our kiosk video on How We Help Publishers at the Association of Educational Publishers Digital Publishing Summit in June as well. Now, whenever we finish any video content, be it a blog entry, live performance, promo video, or education tip, we use these tools to distribute it to as many relevant sites as possible.

Tactic:
Use RSS to aggregate your content across multiple sites and allow users to subscribe to your content feed.

Why It Works:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is another way to quickly and easily distribute your content across multiple sites and directly to users via web, mobile and desktop-based software, typically called aggregators or readers. RSS works on the premise of converting your content to a standardized XML-based feed that can then be consumed by sites and software that support the format. RSS feeds typically include full or summarized text plus metadata that includes publishing dates, authorship or links to image, audio or video content. Users who subscribe to your feed are automatically updated every time you add new content.

Feed readers include desktop applications such as Feedreader and Akgregator, email programs like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook, and browsers like Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (version 7 or higher). There are also many web-based applications that support RSS, like Netvibes, Bloglines, and Pageflakes. Google and other companies such as Mippin and Litefeeds have created RSS readers for mobile devices as well. iTunes and other media aggregators use RSS as the foundation upon which podcasts and other audio/video content are distributed and updated. Blog software auto-generates RSS feeds as well, so if you have a blog set up on your site users can subscribe to your feed. Most social and media sharing sites also have the ability to generate RSS feeds that can be aggregated to other sites, allowing you to subscribe to RSS feeds and populate your site, profile, or page with content from other sources, including your blog, YouTube account, and so on.

Resources:
There are scores of online RSS resources. A Google search of RSS, for instance, brings back ‘about 3,500,000,000’ results. Here are just a few to get you started from the top of the list.

Wikipedia list of RSS readers

RSS Toolbox from mashable.com

Here’s a video from the Plain English folks at Common Craft on RSS. The content is great, but they sure could have benefitted from a lavalier microphone, as the sound quality is a bit iffy. But the content gets the point across.

How We Have Embraced It:
Mightybytes’ news feed automatically gets ported over to the company’s Facebook page and Friendfeed via RSS. Users can also subscribe to our company blog feed. The company blog content gets ported to Friendfeed and Plaxo as well.

Additionally, I use a Twitter plug-in for my feed at timfrick.com, so anytime a new blog entry is added an auto-tweet is generated on my Twitter account. The same goes for my Flickr account, which I can easily use to send photos to my blog with a single click.

Tactic:
Implement an educational email campaign (not one that is filled with thoughtless marketing messages).

Why it Works:
As long as you provide content that your subscribers can use or that they find thought-provoking you shouldn’t have to worry about your newsletter being considered junk or spam. An occasional ‘hey look what we did’ marketing message is fine, but for the most part newsletters work better when they meet the information needs of those to whom they are sent. Services such as MyEmma or Constant Contact let you track user behaviors and feed customized information appropriately. If everyone clicked on the newsletter story about online video but no one looked at the blog entry on house training your cat you might want to consider providing more information on the former and perhaps curbing the cat fancy pontifications.

Resources:
Constant Contact, PatronMail, and MyEmma are just a few of the large number of online resources that make it easy to create email campaigns, manage recipients, and analyze metrics data for a successful email campaign. Before you decide on one particular solution, come up with a list of ‘must have’ features and make sure the solution you are considering best fits your needs.

Most online email campaign tools charge based on number of subscribers and the three mentioned above are comparable in pricing. They also provide sign-up widgets to use on your site for bringing in new subscribers and offer many options for sorting campaign data and using that data in future mailings.

How We Have Embraced It:
MyEmma is Mightybytes’ particular email management tool of choice and we really like the ease with which it allows us to manage our campaigns. With Emma we can create our own custom-designed HTML templates (important for a design firm), glean relevant data regarding how our campaigns are received, and target particular users with very specific content. For instance, we can save everyone who clicked on a story in our last email about online video as a group and target those particular subscribers with video-specific content.

As a general rule, we only send out e-mail newsletters when there’s enough useful information to make for interesting reading. Sometimes that’s once per month, sometimes every other month. Our standard newsletter, which we’ve dubbed the Mbulletin, typically contains a blend of tutorials about how we accomplished a particular task for a client or project and relevant marketing messages about specific accomplishments, such as awards or recent projects. 

Terrible Spaceship, an ‘ambient synthetic horror pop’ ensemble comprised of Bumpus members and folks from Mightybytes performed their very first show at Martyrs in early September. The experience was a well-received sensory overload of music, performance and synced video clips that captured audience attention and got the crowd moving. The show gave us an opportunity to experiment with triggering visuals and creating real-time motion graphics on-the-fly using an M-Audio Trigger Finger and new software from Arkaos called Grand VJ.

Tools of the Trade
In addition to the Grand VJ software, we also used our usual media creation tools like After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, and so on. To complement the album’s War of the Worlds theme, we first built a library of old retro space footage and edited clips down to a manageable length. We then created custom animations for specific portions of each song to fill gaps as needed. Once all the production work was complete, we had 146 clips total, ranging in subject matter from old propaganda films, sci-fi movie clips, TV footage, educational films, and the aforementioned custom animations. At that point we started building the Grand VJ project file.

1.0 Software
Considering its 1.0 release status, Grand VJ is excellent software, though I certainly have my fair share of feature requests for the next version. The Terrible Spaceship set consisted of fifteen songs, and Grand VJ gives you sixteen banks that will hold sixteen clips each, so we comprised a bank of clips that would be triggered randomly during each song. Grand VJ supports numerous real-time animation effects as well as live camera inputs, both of which we took advantage of for the show. One of the biggest challenges was choosing real-time effects that fit with our retro sci-fi theme. Many of the animation presets call attention to themselves with a specific look and feel and thus weren’t appropriate for use within this particular project. Some worked perfectly, however. The binary effect, for instance, seemed a perfect fit for the song Binary has got me Down.

Grand VJ runs in two modes: synth mode, where you can trigger clips individually, or mixer mode, where you can composite up to eight layers of video on top of one another. I experimented with both modes and found the synth mode to better fit my needs for the spontaneity of a live show. Once everything was configured within the Grand VJ project file and we rehearsed the show at Bumpus’ practice space, we were good to go. The result was a fun and spontaneous live exploration of video synced to music. You can see the results in these two clips for Stardust and Elizabeth:

Stardust:

Elizabeth:

Terrible Spaceship is comprised of the following fine folks:
Travis Chandler: Bass
James Johston: Guitar
Andy Rosenstein: Keyboards
Zack Marks: Drums
Tim Frick: Live Visuals
Whit Nelson: Camera

Buy the full album on iTunes.

Flash is amazing. For years it has allowed programmers to do what was impossible in the browser. When it comes to games, rich media, and specifically video, it has been eating HTML and JavaScript’s lunch for years. No longer. With improvements in JavaScript speed, the creation of browser agnostic libraries to simplify development, and the wide adoption of AJAX for asynchronous communication, it would seem that JavaScript is back.

For a digital media company like Mightybytes, finding the right tool can be as involved a process as using it. Our original portfolio page was designed in early 2007 completely in Flash. While sleek and efficient, the design had a fatal flaw: the content was locked up in the Flash player, uncrawlable by the search engines. We decided to port this function into a standard language, and expose the content as HTML. JavaScript animation libraries allowed for much of the same interactive feeling that the original Flash movie provided. We couldn’t abandon Flash altogether, as we needed it to display video samples, at the very least.

We decided to create a Flash viewer, which would load video and image data, and allow the user to browse it. Viewer aside, the majority of the page was built in HTML and JavaScript, using the jQuery library. The JavaScript would use ActionScript hooks to communicate with the Flash viewer, instructing it which media to load. The Flash viewer would also communicate back to the JavaScript where necessary.

Building the JavaScript to behave like the previous interface was surprisingly intuitive. The trick to jQuery’s animations lie in the incremental adjustment of CSS rules over time. Want to slide something right? Incrementally increase it’s left margin. If your knowledge of CSS is good, you will quickly invent new ways to animate objects and containers on the page.

Once the data is in HTML it can be crawled by the search engines. All text for each entry is loaded into the page and hidden until needed. The reason we didn’t use AJAX to pull the entries in asynchronously is the same reason we pulled them out of Flash:

“ ... like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully.”
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [source]

Perhaps Google is capable of indexing this AJAX content, but Google isn’t the only search engine, and broad access to crawlers was a very high priority.

jQuery has revolutionized the way that I look at the page, much in the same way ActionScript revolutionized the way I look at the stage. All things once seemed static and mysterious under the browser’s hood, but cross-browser libraries have changed all that. Not only that, but they have sped up development time by making JavaScript write once, run anywhere. In short, JavaScript is amazing.

The new portfolio is slated for a Halloween launch.

Tip #3: Create and update social networking profiles on all the major community sites, including those that cater to special niche interests.

Why It Works:
Social media sites are built around the idea of community-based sharing. They offer a great opportunity for you to keep in touch and exchange information with a large number of people at a time. By updating profile content and status as often as possible your friends and constituents are kept up to date with what’s going on in your world. Conversely, you also receive updates from those in your personal network, including job leads, events, and yes, even notices that they are on a bus or doing pilates.

Also, joining groups that reflect your intentions and endeavors will put you in touch with like-minded people or those who might be interested in your product or service. Finally, each of these sites offer the chance via your profile to link back to a company site, personal site, blog, or all of the above, thus generating more external links and increasing search engine ranking.

As with blogs, these sites only work as marketing tools if you keep them updated regularly. Each time you change your status, add a video, join a group or share a link it goes to the top of the list of network updates. But that goes for all the people in your network as well, so if you have 200 friends on Facebook, for instance, and they each make an update over the course of the day, yours will be at the bottom of the list by day’s end.

Resources:
Social site are cropping up on a near daily basis due in part to the huge popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook. General sites are being usurped by niche social sites catering to users with very specific needs or interests. Shelfari and Good Reads cater to book lovers while Cork’d caters to wine afficianados, and so on. If you’re a business professional you probably already have a LinkedIn account, and maybe even a Plaxo profile, but there are many more resources out there for social media marketing as well.

This is by no means a thoroughly comprehensive list of social sites, but includes those we use most often:
LinkedIn
Facebook
MySpace
Crunchbase
Friendster
WhoHub (shared professional interviews)
Plaxo
Xing
Wis.dm (get questions answered)
Squidoo (create pages on shared topics)
Twitter (update your status)

Other niche sites:
Flickr (photo sharing)
Good Reads (for those who like books)
Shelfari (for those who like books)
Cork’d (for wine fans)
OddPodz (for the creative community)
FineTune (music)
imeem (music)
Last.FM (music)
Meetup
Yelp (restaurant and business reviews)

How We Have Embraced It:
I have created either personal or company profiles on all of the sites mentioned above and update them on a near daily basis. Sometimes the update is as simple as “Tim is getting ready for a conference.” Sometimes updates include videos, press releases, photos, news stories, links to relevant content, and so on. We also have configured our various profiles so that anytime an entry is added to the blog or News section of the Mightybytes site it is aggregated via RSS to our company Facebook page, Plaxo profile, Friendfeed account and several other places. I have set up my personal blog so that every time I post an entry my Twitter account gets an auto-Tweet. I almost always receive some sort of comment on the posted item, be it words of encouragement, shared facts, or just a friendly hello from someone I haven’t spoke to in a while.

Tip #2: Create an informative blog on your topic of choice.

Why It Works:
Like content management systems, blogs are natural search engine magnets. They also help you communicate with a community of like-minded people and, if you regularly provide insightful and useful content, can position you as a thought leader in your particular industry.

A blog won’t do its job if you don’t update it, however. Gartner Group says that over 200 million bloggers abandon their blogs within a year after starting them. Tenacity, patience and fortitude are the keys to blog success. And of course it helps if you can write your way out of a paper sack as well.

Here are a few things to consider when it comes to blogging:

Make It Useful:
A blog with copious amounts of helpful educational content, news tidbits, and so on positions you as an expert in your field. It shows that you are passionate about your blog’s topic and instills confidence in those who may want to buy your services or products. Knowing what you want to blog about is the first big hurdle. Come up with a strategy on how you will approach content as well as an always evolving list of things to blog about that will serve your target audience well.

Comments and Trackbacks:
Find blogs on similar topics and start making comments on the posts. Utilizing blog comments and trackback fields will help you communicate with like-minded individuals across a series of blogs. This also helps build links back to your site, which ultimately increases search engine ranking.

Use Your Blog’s RSS Features:
Blog content can be easily aggregated via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so users can subscribe to your blog feed, which alerts them to new entries instantaneously. RSS also lets you automatically feed blog posts to your Facebook, Plaxo or Xing profiles or send a new blog post alert to Twitter.

Register Your Blog:
Be sure to register your blog with sites like Technorati, Bloglines, BlogPulse, Google BlogSearch, and so on. These sites track blog traffic, links, and content in different ways. They can be used to get your content in front of a larger audience and will also provide metric data such as how many sites link to you and who they are.

Resources:
There is a huge wellspring of knowledge available online on every aspect of blogging and blog marketing. A simple Google search on “Why should I blog?” reveals ‘about 41,100,000’ results, so there’s no shortage of information on this topic available. Any of the sites mentioned above contain valuable insights that can answer many of your questions. The usual suspects of MarketingProfs, Hubspot, and Marketing Sherpa are great places to start. The American Marketing Association also offers seminars and online webinars on many aspects of blogging and online marketing as well.

If you prefer the analog approach, Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright is an excellent resource to help you answer the questions you might have about blogging. The book includes thorough explanations of why you should start blogging and how to do it. Real world case studies on blog success stories offer useful information as well.

How We Have Embraced It:
Mightybytes added the Mblog to our site earlier this year. Updating its content while simultaneously juggling multiple client projects is admittedly a company challenge, but one we are committed to meeting over the long haul. Thus, we write when we can. Sometimes it’s several times per week. Sometimes it’s once or twice a month. Our entire site, including the blog, is currently run by Expression Engine, so in effect the entire thing is a series of blogs since that’s how EE deals with site content. We have also configured, skinned and created custom templates for many client blogs as well.