O’Reilly just published Packaging for Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the third and final article in my series on building AppExchange applications.

Check out part one, Introduction to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, and part two, Using the Salesforce.com API

Just posted my Using the Saleforce API article on the O’Reilly Network:

In this article I’m going to turn a blog into a Salesforce lead generator by integrating the blog comments with Salesforce Leads using the Salesforce API, SOQL (a Salesforce-specific, SQL-like query language), and some Salesforce object customization.

If you hear the phrase “lead generation” and picture a car salesman, then you should probably step back and think about what you do when someone posts a comment to your blog. Do you try to find their blog? Google them? Go as far as emailing them? If you comment on my blog, you can be assured that I’m going to email you back.

Lead generation and tracking is a big part of any sales process and a major concept inside the Salesforce CRM. Many businesses are adding blogs to their sales and marketing activities and will want to integrate these into their existing sales process.

I went to a Salesforce conference recently to investigate Salesforce as a platform for building applications for the business web. I liked what I saw. The tools they are building for developers fit very much with the trend toward smaller development companies (i.e. one or two people) who can focus completely on the product because the infrastructure for running the rest of the company already exists.

Today O’Reilly posted part one of my three part series on building for Salesforce AppExchange, An Introduction to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Mark Mangano is the author of Sales Force Watch, the top blog for independent Sales Force News, and Scott Hemmeter is the author of the Perspectives on Salesforce blog and also a successful Salesforce consultant.

I was at the Dreamforce ‘06 Conference investigating AppExchange, Saleforce.com’s 3rd party development and distribution platform because I was curious about opportunities for lone consultants and very small companies to produce software for the business web.

Scott and Mark were kind enough to talk to me about how many of the barriers to entry have dropped and how easy it is to get started in this world.

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