Scoble on how Microsoft can change Reminds me a bit of Jerry Maguire.

Be sure to read this weeks Carnival of Marketing

Today's debate: Can you make a living blogging. From Jason's site, more links.

A friend of mine is working in a landscaping business. He needs to build up personal relationships with folks who may be doing home projects in the future. These are substantial projects, involving large commitments of time and money. He has several options.
He's very good at building personal relationships. However, with managing the number of projects he runs, there's a finite amount of time in the day he can spend on the phone or individually emailing folks.

He also does a lot of interesting projects, that people tend to be very curious about to hear details. It's not often you hear how one moves a five ton rock, or import enough flowers to cover an entire backyard.

He has an opportunity to utilize either an e-mail newsletter or a blog to enhance relationships on an ongoing basis. These would keep him visible on a regular schedule, and provide valuable information to clients. Plus, and I've found this with many professionals, they have an intro speech they make to new clients. In his case, it's essentially "What a Landscape Architect Does for You". With the avaibility of this information on the web, people will immediately have that understanding, and can engage him with a fuller understanding of his capabilities. There's a clear market on the Internet for high end information, and English Cut is a great example. Thomas has doubled his sales of custom made suits, and undoubtedly cut down on the number of explanations that he has given about why you would want one.

As he meets new people on a regular basis, he can offer to add them to the email feed from his blog or his newsletter, a generous offer that won't require any additional work on his end. With a relatively small investment of time, he'll be enhancing his relationships, solidfying his status as an expert in the field, and likely bringing in some additional business.

The other good news is there aren't many professionals posting in this space. A few of the most easily found in search engines are posted below, but there's lots of room, especially in the geographic area he's in.

http://www.oclandscape.com/ocblog/
About.com - landscape guide
http://pruned.blogspot.com/ - personal landscape blog
Landscape Management Magazine's blog -

New search marketing magazine: Free charter subscriptions are available to Search Marketing Standard (no credit card needed).

Several useful web tools:

http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
Entering your site, it will show you the Yahoo rank for the search phrase you put in, how many pages are indexed in Google, and a variety of other useful stats.

http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/ -
Put in your URL, it will show you who links to you, and the text of the anchor tags.