Dipping into the Blogpond

As an Australian business owner, I’ve often lamented (more so privately than here) the lack of a localised press release service – along the lines of SBWire, and thought there HAS to be a market for a similar service in Australia.

During a Google search today, I came across a site called Killer Startups, and thought I’d do a search on startups in Australia.

This led me to a site called Plugger – Australian Business News. From what I can see, the site serves a couple of functions.

1. As a news monitoring site
2. As a news submission service

I think this is a great service for the Australian business community, and well overdue. At this stage, it’s free to use, and free to advertise (i.e. submit your business news).

So who’s behind this website?

plugger is designed, developed and managed by Stephen Phillips and John C Lyons, two experienced web entrepreneurs based in Brisbane, Queensland. John and Stephen have many years market research experienced and have successfully developed a range of web businesses.

I’m assuming that this is the John C Lyons who co-authored (along with Edward de Bono, of Thinking Hats fame) “Marketing Without Money” – which would make a lot of sense.

Update: Yes, I was right about John, who’s also a professional company director with many years of business experience.

Stephen Phillips tells me he (Stephen) has had about 15 years experience working on the web, and he started plugger as solution to the problem that faces many small to medium businesses – building awareness and finding sales. Stephen most recently was a co-founder of the Mother and Child website, which was sold in December 2006 to enable him to develop plugger.

What exactly is Plugger?

Plugger is an Australian business news montoring service designed for Sales and Marketing professionals. Anyone responsible for devising marketing strategy, finding new prospects or driving sales should use plugger every day….Plugger consumes hundreds of RSS feeds from Australia’s leading business news and blogs (Fairfax, News Ltd, Ninemsn and many more). Every 30 minutes it scours the web to grab all the latest news…. Plugger is perhaps already the single biggest store of Australian Business news currently available free online. If not, then it soon will be.

Essentially whilst you can monitor the site and search any time, Plugger also allows you to get customised news delivered via email every morning – a bonus for the busy professional. This is done via registration and creation of a search profile – not unlike Google Alerts, just localised (a hint, if you register, save your profile as you go).

What’s in it for your business?

Once you register, you can post your own articles direct to the site. You can also add news@plugger.com.au to your email newsletters to automatically promote your company.

The site includes Google like text ads. When you register you can save a text ad about your company pointing to your web site. Plugger matches your ad, using your search criteria, to target all visitors to the site searching for news related to your company.

You can also upload the RSS feed of your company’s news site (in our case the dLook News Blog).

My verdict

This site is great if you’re interested in an alternative Australian news search, but if you need to monitor segments of the news, or are a (small) business in need of additional promotional channels, then you should definitely register.

And did I mention it’s free?