Biznik Supporting Member benefit: 26 times more traffic to your website
Since we began tracking every click on Biznik.com on Oct. 9, there has been an average of 300 offsite clicks made each day. That is, visitors of Biznik who followed a link that took them off this site to another one by following a link they discovered on Biznik. Most of those links are links to the blogs and websites of Biznik members, who have posted them on their profiles, in signature lines, in promotions, and many other places on the site. So we know lots of members are getting traffic from Biznik. But which members are getting the most traffic? Is there a correlation between membership level and traffic? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding “YES.” Take a look at this graph:
For every person who clicks on a basic member’s link, 26 people click on a Supporting Member’s link. And for every person who clicks a Basic (free) member’s link, 8 people click on an Active Member’s link. Wow! That’s a huge benefit to paying members, and in particular, to Supporting Members.
If you’ve tried to buy advertising recently, you’ll immediately recognize the significance these numbers: the $24 per month that Biznik Supporting Membership costs is an advertising steal. Not to mention the other benefits of Supporting Membership: Enhanced profiles that allow you to display your logo and associations, blog headlines on your profile, unlimited promotions, unlimited private messages, and much more.
business networking clicks social media social networking
0 Comments New forthcoming feature: Business Articles and Tips
We’re in the final stages of readying a new feature for release on Biznik: Articles and Tips. Unlike previous features, this one will be released first in beta form, to Supporting Members and a small group of invited participants. We are releasing this to Supporting Members first and foremost because we love Supporting Members! And we want you to feel the love by having first crack at this awesome new tool. Secondly, we need a whole lot of articles in the pipeline before we can launch this to the rest of the site, so this will be an opportunity for Supporting Members to post as many articles as they like. Here’s how it works:
By the end of this week, Supporting Members will see a new tab to the main navigation, called Learn. (It will be hidden from all other users until some time in December or whenever we receive enough articles to make it launch worthy). Under that tab, you’ll find a list of articles and business tips, that are authored by members, for members. Members will be able to rate the articles and tips on a scale of 1-10, and the most helpful articles and tips will become the most visible. By contributing enough highly ranked articles, you will earn an “expert” badge on your profile, which will help you build your reputation inside the Biznik community.
If you’d like to have first-crack at this new feature and an opportunity to contribute articles of your own, now is a great time to upgrade your account to Supporting Membership.
articles Biznik business networking business tips online reputation social network
1 CommentReal names, please
We’ve decided to enforce a policy that requires all Biznik members to use their real name on their profile. The motivation behind this is simple: if you’re going to do business with someone, you are going to want to know their name. Simple. Our secondary motivation is to ensure a high degree of trust in the Biznik community. It’s pretty difficult to develop trust for someone who won’t even tell you their name. Many other social networks allow made-up usernames and pretty much anything goes, and as a result, trust suffers. You have no idea whether the person you’re interacting with is actually the person you think they are. Facebook is a notable exception - they require real names, and as a result the integrity of the network is much higher.
I’ve begun asking members who have put things like their business name into their name field to change it, so this is a head’s up to everyone to be sure your profile first and last name fields list your real first and last name, and nothing else (no keyword stuffing allowed here - that is a violation of our Code of Conduct). In some cases I will be editing profile names directly to ensure compliance.
We will make exceptions from time to time, where appropriate. Same thing for stage names like Xakary - http://biznik.com/members/xakary- we will accept those as valid. Some members have expressed a desire to use only an initial, and we will accept that for your first names, but not your last name.
name policy real social networkBiznik adds 6,000th member: David Whitfield
Biznik member #6,000 joined yesterday, and I’d like to welcome David Whitfield from Bellevue, Washington. It took us two months and four days to go from 5,000 to 6,000 members. Think we can half that to one month to 7,000? Here’s the link to invite your friends!
Biznik business invite social networkRaise your business profile with a Biznik badge
We’ve created a new way for you to raise your profile on Biznik: a small badge that you can post into the sidebar of your blog or website. Displaying the badge drives extra traffic to your profile, and also helps raise the overall page rank of the Biznik social network by creating an inbound link from another site, which benefits all of us.
To use these, just head to the badge page and grab the code (after logging in it will be personalized for you automatically). Then open up your html editor or open your blog’s template editor, and paste the code into the sidebar wherever you want it to appear.
If you really want to take it up a notch, you can add this badge to the footer of every email you send, in a signature file, which will look like this:
Pretty cool, hey? I’ve created an html file that I am using for this purpose - you can download it and use it as the starting point for creating your own (you will of course need to replace my contact info with your own). It’s a little geeky to implement, so you’ll need to follow these directions precisely:
Apple Mail instructions: http://allforces.com/2006/04/14/css-signatures/.
Outlook instructions: http://email.about.com/cs/oetipstricks/qt/et121503.htm.
Biznik business download mail signature promotionThanks MyDayOffice
The Biznik Happy Hour at MyDayOffice was a big hit on Wednesday night here in Seattle, attracting a hundred Biznik members. Thank you Shauna Brennan for sponsoring this event, Biznik’s first sponsored event in Seattle. I made a panoramic picture of the crowd at it’s peak, below:
This picture was made in the kitchen are of MyDayOffice. Here’s a few more snaps that show more of this classy Belltown business center, where independent professionals can rent office space by the hour, day or month.
You can see a bunch more pictures on the event page.
business coworking mydayoffice Seattle workspaceAnd the iPod winner is: Mara Applebaum!
John and I are working today at Office Nomads in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, the co-working space recently opened by Jacob Sayles. We had him push the button to randomly select the winner of the iPod from among nearly 600 members who submitted the Biznik member survey we ran last week. And Mara Applebaum is the big winner!
Congratulations Maura, and thank you to all of you who took the time to complete the survey - we have a much better picture of Biznik’s membership now, and we’ll be releasing some of the results of the survey here in the coming days.
Biznik ipod member survey winAttend NWEN’s Entrepreneur University and save $50
Entrepreneur University 2007: Soaring to Success
November 8, 2007 — 7:30am to 7:30pm
Bell Harbor Conference Center
I had coffee last week with Margo Shiroyama, the interim director of Northwest Entrepreneur Network, an organization that shares many of Biznik’s goals, who told me about an event her organization is hosting that I think every entrepreneurial-minded Biznik member would benefit from attending. It’s called Entrepreneur University, and it will be an extraordinary opportunity to make connections, learn new skills and pitch your business to potential investors. I’m pleased to announce that Biznik is a sponsor of this event, and we’ve worked out a discount in which the first 10 Biznik members who sign up will save $50 on the registration fee (see details below).
Why show up? Educational sessions will teach you real-life lessons in marketing, sales, finance and operations from experienced presenters. You’ll also find activities that help you expand your network of entrepreneurial peers and connections. Need to raise money for your venture? At lunch you can sign up for VC Bistro and meet one-on-one with venture capitalists from several firms. Or grab your lunch and participate in one of the 20+ Table Topics devoted to specific areas of entrepreneurship. Interested in setting up a great executive team? Angel investors? Bootstrapping? Want to know more about pricing practices? Find your table and meet your newest friends.
At the end of the day, you’ll be invited to put your 60-second elevator pitch to the press test. A local press panel, which includes John Cook who writes the Venture Capital column for the Seattle PI; Brier Dudley, Senior Reporter for the Seattle Times; and Eric Engleman, who covers venture capital for the Puget Sound Business Journal, will critique and rate each pitch. If your pitch is good enough, who knows, you just might score some ink.
Special offer: The first 10 Biznik members to sign up for Entrepreneur University will receive $50 off the regular signup price. I’ve already emailed the promotion code to all Seattle Biznik members - if you are a Biznik member outside this area and would like to attend, email me at dan [at] biznik [dot] com, and I’ll give you the code.
Lara and I will both be going - we look forward to seeing some of you there!
business conference entrepreneur Seattle startup workshopBiznik social network recognized in 2007 W3 Awards
Biznik has received its first award ever: the W3 Awards Silver Winner in the Social Network category, from the International Academy of Visual Arts (www.w3award.com). Receiving over 2,700 entries, the W3 Awards honors outstanding Websites, Web Marketing, and Web Video created by some of the best interactive agencies, designers, and creators worldwide.
“We were incredibly impressed by the quality and creativity of this year’s entries,” said Linda Day, the director of the IAVA. “W3 winners continue to raise the bar in Web development and design, push the limits of web advertising creative and pioneer the use of web video. We are thrilled to have reviewed such a diverse and respected pool of work. On behalf of the entire Academy, we applaud our winners as they continue to advance Internet creativity and greatly contribute to the burgeoning online world.”
It feels great to get some recognition for all the work our team of three has been doing over the past two years to create a home for business networking that doesn’t suck. I guess that means we can call Biznik “an award-winning social network,” hey? I’d like to particularly thank developer John Adair for all the work he’s doing to keep Biznik on the cutting edge of online business networking. And Nadja Haldimann for her design work (she also designed the Biznik logo). And of course, all of you in the Biznik community for telling us what works for you so we can build it for you!
About the W3 Awards
The W Awards honors creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning Websites, Web video and online marketing programs. Simply put, the W is the first major Web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms, and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies.
The W3 Awards is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising and marketing firms. Please visit www.iavisarts.org for a full member list and additional information. For more information about the W Awards, visit www.w3award.com.
award Biznik social network winnerBiznik launches major improvements to member profiles, adds new business promotion tools
We launched a major upgrade to the Biznik website this afternoon, the most significant round of improvements we’ve made to the site since July. Our major goal with this update is to enhance the member profiles with new information that is constantly fresh, and to give paying members even more perks and tools to help them actively promote their business.
Here’s a taste of what the new member profile looks like (to the profile’s owner):
OK, let me jump in and outline what’s new:
Enhanced member profiles. Gone from the front page of your profile is the static information about you. It’s been replaced by an activity log that shows, at a glance, what a member has been doing on Biznik.com. You’ll also see immediately whether a member is attending any upcoming events, and what they need right now has been added into a sidebar under a new feature, member promotions (more about that in moment). Your most recent posts - in Biz Talk or comments on events - are now called out onto the front of your profile, which allows someone to see what you’re saying at once without having to hunt for it. Compliments have been truncated, allowing more to fit into the bottom of your profile.
Paying members get even better profiles. Active and Supporting members can now add a logo to their profile. Also, paying members can list up to 5 associations on their profile. Finally, Active members can now have up to 2 urls, and Supporting members can have up to 3. Basic members are limited to one URL.
New Promotions tool. If you have a promotion to share with the Biznik community, you can now post it on Biznik. Promotions are displayed on a new page under the member directory, along with a single place to find all of the most recently posted member needs. By default, you see promotions from members near you (just like the member directory) - you can control which promotions you see by setting the radius from your location, or view all using the search controls. Important: Promotions are displayed by date, but all paying members’ promotions will outrank free member promotions in the directory. What that means is that paying members will have their promotions much more visibile than free members. It’s a great reason to upgrade your membership if you haven’t yet!
Enhanced network. We’ve pulled the most recenty added 12 members to your business network out onto the left sidebar of your profile, and added a new feature that shows which mutual connections you share with a member. And the network page itself is hugely improved, with each member now displayed on a single line, allowing us to include a link showing their recent activity from within the network page. Here’s a peek:
Enhanced bookmarks. We’ve made bookmarks much more useful by including them under the tab for, respectively, Network, Events and Posts. Each section now has subnavigation that allows you to instantly access all of your bookmarks. And, on the bookmarks page, each note is in yellow, like sticky notes. It looks like this:
Design enhancements. Gone are the big clunky edit and delete buttons, replaced by light grey buttons that are much less obtrusive and distracting. We’ve also added a consistent subnavigation style, that features simple links, which is applied throughout the site.
Account settings streamlined. All of your account information is now accessible under a single tab, called “Your Account.” Under that, you’ll now find two sections, one for your personal information, and one for upgrading, downgrading, or closing your account.
Searchable Member Needs. What members need near you is now collected in a single page, under the member directory. Searching on this page restricts the search to just the needs field, which means you’ll be able to find matches for what you’re offering in the blink of an eye. Here’s what it looks like:
I’d like to say a big thank you to John Adair, Biznik’s Ruby on Rails guru, who has been busting butt for the past few weeks to bring these to life for all of us in code. We’re thrilled with how the new profiles feel so much more alive, are easier to maintain, and provide additional value to paying members.
Finally, if you find bugs, please let us know by posting them in the bug reports forum. I’ll be blogging about how to get the most out of each of these new features soon, but for now, I just want to say have at ‘em!
business networking new social networking update web 2.0