So, here goes:

Career News & Job Search

All Top Career News:  a cornucopia of career news, articles, tips by hundreds of bloggers.

Job Mob: has some insightful articles and good tips.

Entrepreneurship

How To Change The World: Guy Kawasaki, is a pretty down to earth guy, but he is actually world famous as a tech entrepreneur, evangelist, author, speaker and blogger. He gets it, big time, and he shares his insights generously.

Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: If you can get beyond the initial toilet paper analogy, which is humorous, if a little indelicate, Mike Michalowicz offers good advice and tips for new entrepreneurs.

About Entrepreneurs: Scott Allen’s practical guide for entrepreneurs.

Planning Startups Stories, the very seasoned and successful Tim Berry’s blog, sharing his insights on starting your business.

Bootstrap Me: about bootstrapping, small business, entrepreneurs, start up.

Escape From Cubicle Nation: a favorite and one which will start you thinking about how to move on.

Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing: John Jantsch has to be at or close to the top when it comes to marketing.

Seth Godin’s Blog: marketing guru has insightful things to say about all things marketing

Winning the Web: internet marketing strategy and other very insightful tips on running a blog.

Social Networking

How To Change The World: Guy Kawasaki, from time to time, has more social networking how to information in one blog than others do all year.  Yes, I know I mentioned Kawasaki under entrepreneurs, which he definitely is, but he is an uber successful guy, who wears many hats, so I thought I’d mention him again in this context.

ChrisBrogan: one of the most popular social networking bloggers, sharing many moments of his life with you and informed tips on how to raise your social networking IQ.

Tech
TechCrunch: Tech news for those in the know.

Silicon Alley Insider if you like to keep up with gossip and goings on in Silicon  Valley

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Let’s face it. Business is about money and the most powerful networks are the ones which are involved every time money changes hands all over the world.  The powerful, well-connected law firms, the large banks, the big four accounting firms,investment bankers on Wall Street and throughout the country…… these are the people at the white hot center of power. Many of the people in these networks can make or break your career or your business, with a nod, a wink or an introduction. These are the interconnected networks, often known as the old boys’ networks, who can introduce you to each other, sponsor you, mentor you, guide you and usher you in to meet the people who can write the biggest checks and who might take a liking to your deal, particularly if their friends like it. After all, just as people promote in their own image, people like to hob nob, do business, chat and knock back a few scotch and waters, light up a few Cohiba cigars after dinner with others like them.

Let’s say you have a very hot tech start up and you want to present it to a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, but you don’t know any personally.  How do you meet one?  Basically, you can’t. Unless you know someone who knows one or works for one.  But your lawyer can.  You lawyer calls one of the ultra powerful law firms in Silicon Valley, whose clients include the biggest and hottest tech companies and a string of venture capitalists.  You lawyer gives you a good reference….basically assuring his colleague that  you are respectable, pay your bills and aren’t a con artist and that the deal you want to talk about is a real and viable one… then that lawyer arranges an introduction to a venture capitalist.  Voila! It’s done.

But how do you cozy up to a lawyer in the first place?  And not just any lawyer.  It has to be a civil ( as opposed to criminal) lawyer in an affluent, extremely well connected firm.  Rich people always have lawyers.  They need them for tax and estate planning.  If you are not yet in that category you may have to be on the look out to find the right entry lawyer.  I’ll explain what I mean by entry.

Lawyers are on the look out too, for clients.  Most of the big, affluent firms make a point of sending one of their lawyers to hang out with most of the important business organizations in town: the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), the Chamber of Commerce, several of the leading technology organizations.  This is their potential client pool.   Sometimes they send a young lawyer or someone who’s trying to develop a particular practice, say , technology.  But it doesn’t matter who it is or what their field is.  This is your entry lawyer. He or she gets you inside the gates of power. Once you have a relation with a lawyer in the firm, they can produce a lawyer with any kind of specialty you need.  What you will need is someone with contacts in your field who can guide you in the right direction, get you connected with the movers and shakers you need to know, and help you make any deals you may need to make in the future.  If they think you are a comer, someone likely to do big things in the future, you will not have to spend a lot of money with the firm.  They are banking on your future.  And in the meantime, they will probably invite you to firm parties, which you should attend because you definitely will meet some movers and shakers.

So, here’s the sequence. Most of us network a lot of the time, at conferences, seminars, trade industry shows, associations and dinners. We get someone’s business card and we give them ours  We now have a contact within a certain company, someone who can tell us,we hope, who’s on first, who has the power, who to talk to about what, and which way to the water cooler. Good.  But minimal.

Next, we work our contacts to find out which professional organizations relevant to our field have enough juice to attract some power players. And we set out to join one or two of those organizations.  Once in, we look around for the outposts of the Most Powerful Network: the top law firms, accountants or bankers. He or she will definitely be there. ( If they’re not, that tells you something about the organization.  They may be nice, but they might not be powerful.) Then we have to put in the work it takes to develop a relationship and demonstrate our professional abilities.  One way to do this is by volunteering to be on a committee with some power players.  Sometimes these people are on the committee in name only, because they have a recognizable name which impresses people.  You, however, need to be a worker bee, until you achieve that kind of stardom.  You need to nurture those relationships and always give your best.

Once you’ve impressed the powers that be with your skills, your path into the Most Powerful Network and the white hot center of power should be assured.

If you think you have a different or better path, write us and tell us.  We’d love to hear from you.

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Yes, some blogs are profitable – very profitable.

Some are not only profitable,  they have actually helped created a relaible revenue stream for other women through blogging, for which AdvancingWomen.com applauds them.

In a major slice of good news for women on the Internet/blogging scene, Lisa Stone co-founded and took on the position of CEO of BlogHer, an online blogging community for women, with more than 13,000 members and 10,000 blogs on their blog list, reaching more than eight million women each month via their community hub at BlogHer and their  publishing syndicate of more than 1,500 blogs . Stone , who appears to be somewhat of a super star in the world of blogging, had previously helped launch three sponsored blogging networks: American Lawyer Media| Law.com’s legal blog network (2004), followed by Knight Ridder Digital’s Thatsracin.com (2005), and, one she recommended as a consultant, Glam Media (2005). Also, as  executive producer and Editor in Chief/VP, Programming for Women.com (acquired by iVillage in 2001), she launched an 18-channel network and helped grow it to a Top 30 site.  So, it probably should come as no great surprise that Stone figured out a way for women to actually make money with their blogs.  She and her partners created a successful commercial enterprise via BlogHer’s Ad Network, where BlogHer works with bloggers to provide quality sponsors and advertisers with an opportunity to support communities of women online, and women who blog with an opportunity to pay themselves. More about that here.

Lisa Stone co-founder and CEO of BlogHer

Others have gotten into the blog advertising game as well.  One reason is that with the low operating expenses of blogs, many are able to self-sustain through advertising and not be forced to sell off little chunks of themselves, at least in the beginning, to venture capitalists for funding. “Federated Media Publishing, the brainchild of former Industry Standard Publisher John Battelle, operates as a sort of uberblog, selling advertising and carrying out business functions for a stable of 130 independent blogs and related online media.

The emerging business model is to start by selling advertising and build from there with events, subscriptions or product sales. And with audiences growing at double- or triple-digit rates, ad prices are soaring for top blogs.

“Since  2005, when Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington started TechCrunch, his popular blog on Internet startups as a labor of love, it has grown  to  a full-time staff of eight with a  CEO, 1.25 million visitors and $240,000 per month in advertising revenues, not including additional revenue from conferences and parties.”

AdvancingWomen.com would call that pretty profitable.

“When we started selling advertising in this space late in 2005, it was very experimental and risky. We were able to get maybe $4 or $5″ per 1,000 page views, Battelle, said. “For the same impressions we were selling then, we are now on average $20 to $30.”

On the other side of the coin, blogging businesses can make money because their overhead is low. “It’s dirt cheap to operate, which makes break-even incredibly achievable,” said  Jon Callaghan a partner with True Ventures, a Palo Alto venture capital firm that has invested in Om Malik’s technology news blog GigaOm.

Right now, it’s rare for even the most successful blogging operations to employ more than a dozen full-time staff members. Computer power and bandwidth get cheaper all the time. And a headquarters is not essential.

“There are no offices. It’s all virtual,” Daily Kos‘ Markos Moulitsas said about his site .

One success story

TechCrunch illustrates the new blogging math. It sells sponsorships that allow advertisers to display on the home page at $10,000 per month. It also uses Federated Media to sell display ads, keeping 60 percent of the revenue. And it charges $200 to list in its Cool Jobs section, getting about five or six want ads per day. Parties and conferences add another income source. Last month, TechCrunch organized a two-day event at the Palace Hotel that gave 40 startups a platform to tout their wares.

And, as far as spending goes, “our costs are only headcount,” Arrington said.

As blogs mature and start producing good cash flow, they often create additional blogs or new sites, forming networks with multiple products and a common brand identity. For example, GigaOm now offers four additional blogs, all with a common brand, and its staff has grown to 10 full-time employees.

“You’re seeing small media groups being created,” said Paul Walborsky, GigaOm‘s  chief operating officer. “This is the next evolution.”

If what you want is the nitty, gritty facts of the stats and trends today in blogging, read the report below, or go to Technorati for the full report:

Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008.

• Introduction
• Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?
• Day 2: The What And Why of Blogging
• Day 3: The How of Blogging
• Day 4: Blogging For Profit
• Day 5: Brands Enter The Blogosphere

All Blogs Are Not Created Equal

Take a quick journey into the size of the Blogosphere

Blogging is…

• A truly global phenomenon: Technorati tracked blogs in 81 languages in June 2008, and bloggers responded to our survey from 66 countries across six continents.
• Here to stay: Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.

Bloggers are…

• Not a homogenous group: Personal, professional, and corporate bloggers all have differing goals and cover an average of five topics within each blog.
• Savvy and sophisticated: On average, bloggers use five different techniques to drive traffic to their blog. They’re using an average of seven publishing tools on their blog and four distinct metrics for measuring success.
• Intensifying their efforts based on positive feedback: Blogging is having an incredibly positive impact on their lives, with bloggers receiving speaking or publishing opportunities, career advancement, and personal satisfaction.

Blogs are Profitable

The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Note: median investment and revenue (which is listed below) is significantly lower. They are also earning CPMs on par with large publishers.

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Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley.

You already know, or should, that AdvancingWomen.com is hard at work leveling the playing field for women in careers and business, and in the political arena.  What you may not know and what we will tell you now….Shhhh…is that our hidden agenda is to get women’s communities to step up, get on the Net and start mentoring other women in the fields nearest and dearest to them.  That is why we hope women will start exploring some of the new and easy tools available to them and the new breed of women at the helm

So… as a start.. we want to share some of Sarah Lacy ‘s writing with you:

” The fact is, there is a dearth of women at the CEO level in techdom. But make no mistake: There’s a solid core of female leadership right near the top of such companies as Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), and Hewlett-Packard that will no doubt set the tone in tech for years to come.

What’s even more exciting to me is the base of newly empowered and scrappy women working their way up at the startup level. You’ve never heard of scores of them, but these women you have: Tina Sharkey at Johnson & Johnson’s (JNJ) BabyCenter; Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo! (YHOO); Mena Trott, co-founder and president of blogging powerhouse Six Apart; and Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which lets users build their own social networks. And no, Google’s no longer a startup, but there’s good reason to keep an eye on Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice-president for search products and user experience.

Finally, their impact on other women in the Valley has been profound. Dozens of women gather at monthly events put on by a group called Girls in Tech,(an organization that focuses on the collaboration, promotion, growth and success of women in the technology sector)…..The number of women milling around the Valley and talking about starting their own business is increasing dramatically, even if we haven’t seen many hot startups emerge yet. When they do, they’ll have plenty of smart-women role models to follow.”

I met Sarah Lacy a few weeks ago at The Austin Tech Happy Hour at The Marq (6th and Congress) .  Amidst a packed and increasingly noisy crowd of techs, VCs, entrepreneurs, Austin boosters, money guys, climbers, aspiring bloggers and the occasional real Web success, Sarah was sitting quietly at a table in the corner, chatting with whoever approached and signing copies of her new book “Once You’re Lucky Twice You’re Good — The Rebirth of the Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 ” . She was very approachable and quite engaging.  When I got home and had a chance to read her book…almost in one sitting… I found it riveting… fascinating insider stuff, quite knowledgable, well researched with plenty of one on one meetings with the Valley icons and wonderboys: a rare window into the entire chaotic ambiance, Red Bull and pizza nights of the start ups, the quirky personalities of the very young founders, and a spot where a $30 million deal is considered small potatoes. All in all a great read.  Sarah has a hip, Valley Girl writing style and sensibility that I think almost anyone would enjoy. I know I did.

Sarah writes the Valley Girl column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.

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