Are there any good tradeshow marketing blogs out there?

During a discussion with a friend of mine NOT in the exhibit industry recently we were curious if there were any good ‘informational’ tradeshow marketing blogs that were not just a shill front for a sales pitch in each post.

So we took a look, searching for ‘tradeshow marketing blog’ on Yahoo, Google and MSN.

It didn’t take long to find blogs that were corporate fronts that spent most of the time pitching a sale, a product or a service – but little useful tradeshow marketing information or tools.

It took a little longer to find actual honest-to-goodness blogs that seemed interested in helping you become a better tradeshow marketer.

So here was our bar: if you’re billing yourself as a ‘tradeshow marketing blog’ there should be at least 50% content that is informative and useful. Now that doesn’t mean there can’t be ANY pitches, but those blatant BUY SOMETHING NOW blogs didn’t make the cut.

In a brief time, here’s what we found:

EXHIB-IT! Blog is billed as a ‘Tradeshow Marketing Experts’ blog, and operated by DJ Heckes, owner of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts in New Mexico. I’d heard of her before, and can recall reading some of her stuff years ago. The WordPress powered blog appears to have been around since late ’07 or early ’08, but there appear to be only one or two posts a month. While not a terrifically active blog, there is good information here. (Alexa rank #3,839,792 most popular website)

Tradeshow Marketing Blog.com is full of great posts relating directly to tradeshow marketing. It’s the stepchild of Ideas 4 Now in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. It’s been around since June of 2008 and looks to have 3 – 4 posts per month. Traffic-wise, it’s Alexa ranking is 2,828,682.

Tradeshow Emporium’s Weblog (does anybody use that word ‘weblog’ anymore??) is a mix of useful tradeshow marketing information and industry news. It appears to have a little over half-a-dozen posts over the past month. While most were useful, there were a couple that were blatant pitches or product announcements. The blog, hosted on WordPress.org, didn’t have an Alexa ranking and didn’t offer any contact or ‘about’ information on the blog; I had to track it down through links in their product-pitch posts.

The Trade Show Exhibit Advice Blog offered useful marketing and information posts – about 3 or 4 a month – and is the blog of the Tradeshow Network Marketing Group near Chicago. The Alexa ranking is 4,371,558.

Heidi Miller’s Talk It Up! blog is mostly tradeshow marketing related, although other things slip in. Heidi is a professional tradeshow presenter so her insights are filtered through her experiences as getting up onstage at show after show. She’s a frequent post-er and uses embedded videos often to illustrate her point or to add to the variety of her blog. Definitely a worthy blog. Alexa rank is 1,118,497.

We found several more, but just wanted to toss a few out there as an ‘average’ sampling in a random search using just one term: “tradeshow marketing blog.’ Many that we found were just pitch-fests. Others offered useful information mixed in with a pitch or two.

And of course a few blogs that we’re aware of in the tradeshow industry didn’t show up with our specific search term.

What tradeshow marketing blogs do you like? Leave a comment with a link if you’d like!