The Blog Tree: New Growth. Fruit for Your RSS Feed [Infographic]

A couple weeks ago, I attended Content Marketing World, where I presented on the business value of infographics.  Although the conference was chock full o’ content marketing goodness, one line rang most loudly: “You’ve gotta go through the eyes to get to the brain.”

Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner delivered that gem as he riffed on the importance of design. The social Web is a noisy place. Looking like everyone else is a reliable way to make sure you go unnoticed.

Eloqua focuses tirelessly on visual communications. Design helps us tell stories, build relationships with influencers, and cheer the work of others. Last year, storytelling, influence and curation came together in The Blog Tree, a collaboration between Eloqua and JESS3 that turned a hackneyed “top blogs list” into a rich, playful visual that not only listed top marketing blogs, but also showed the interrelationships between and among them.

The results – nearly a thousand tweets, hundreds of inbound links and 49 sales/opportunities – suggest Stelzner is right: The way to the brain is, indeed, through the eyes.

So we are back at it, again. Just as we reimagined our Social Media Playbook into the Social Media ProBook, we’ve similarly revisited The Blog Tree. We’re calling today’s visual is The Blog Tree: New Growth edition because it celebrates a very important group of bloggers. New ones.

All gene pools benefit from healthy DNA, and if the blogosphere is going to continue to evolve, it’s important that new voices are heard. The Blog Tree: New Growth cheers about 60 active, insightful blogs launched (or significantly re-engineered) after January 1, 2009.  It’s truly a collection of the freshest voices on the Web.

After combing through the feedback we received on the original Blog Tree, we made two significant changes in this version:

1. Interactivity: Today’s infographic is interactive. Every leaf links to the corresponding blog. Interactivity was a popular request in the wake of last year’s visual, and when we shared a draft with the bloggers featured on the New Growth version, they too asked for it. The result is an infographic that fulfills its promise of making it easier for you to discover blogs we think you’ll love.

1. (Much) Better Ranking System: Last year’s version looked only at Web traffic, and we received a bit of pushback on that ranking model. So we turned to one of the world’s most reliable sources of trust and influence: Edelman. We used Edelman’s BlogLevel tool as our sole data supplier because it gave us the most holistic view of each blog’s relative influence, popularity, engagement and trustworthiness.

If you would like to see your blog depicted on a future Blog Tree infographic, simply “Like” Eloqua on Facebook and tag yourself in the image. We’ll review each suggestion and decide which meet the criteria to be included in future infographics. That’s exactly how the Simple Marketing Blog and two others found their way onto this New Growth edition.

Lastly, if you want to keep up with these bloggers on social media, be sure to follow our new Twitter list. It’s made up of the handles for every blogger featured on today’s infographic.

We also have a badge to let the world know your budding blog has been recognized by a leaf on the The Blog Tree: New Growth:

Here is the badge embed code:
<p><a href="http://blog.eloqua.com/the-new-blog-tree/" target=_blank><img border="0" title="The Blog Tree New Growth" src="http://blog.eloqua.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/The-Blog-Tree-New-Growth-Badge.jpg" alt="The Blog Tree: New Growth from Eloqua JESS3"/></a></p>

Design/Data Visualization:

Established Company:

News/Commentary:

Personal (Marketer):

Personal (Author):

Personal (Journalist):

Start-up:

Root System: