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We will now begin a blog entry discussing the benefits of blogging.  Yes, this is a blog on blogging, *gasp*.  Do not fret; the universe will most likely not collapse upon itself but there exists a strong possibility of meeting the bizzaro world version of yourself later today.  Let us travel back to 1998 to the conception of the “blogosphere” as we know it.  In that year only a handful of blogs existed on the internet.  These sites, coined “weblogs” by Jorn Barger, were essentially online journals for motivated individuals.  For a unique glimpse to the early days of blogging check out this list of blogs existing in the year 2000.  Fast forward 10 years and writing a blog is America’s newest favorite past-time with an estimate by Wired magazine stating nine blogs being created every minute.  Some estimates placed the number of blogs world wide to be close to 100 million with many more readers in 2008.

Of these 100 million blogs, many bloggers are not very committed to their blog and their target audience consists mainly of friends and family.  Furthermore, many blogs are concerned with the blogger’s hobbies and/or interest.  Lastly we have the part of the blogosphere, which this blog exists in, the business sector.  The blog is a useful tool for any and all types of business.  The blog creates a dialog with customers and stakeholders that can be extremely useful in generating value.  Also, the blog becomes a tool for attracting visitors to your website which may lead to future opportunities.

As you ponder starting a blog, there a few things to consider; the host of your blog, your blogs content and attracting readers.  Many avenues for hosting blogs exist online, check out this database to pick the right one for you. On a side note, these are all third party blog hosts and will not be hosted within your website. In order to have the blog be internal to your site you will need to contact your webhost to set that up.  Now onto the next step, deciding what the heck you are going to write about.  To start off, maybe write a small introduction explaining your business and welcoming visitors to your company’s blog.  Remember the blog is a conversation and can be funny and witty.  Also remember to keep the posts succinct and to the point, unlike this post.  Once you have a post or two published online you will want to attract readers for these posts.  Try an email to your contacts directing them to your brand new blog.  Also, make sure the blog has a link on your company’s homepage so potential customers can read about your business.  Another suggestion is to network your blog in the blogosphere.  Check out blog database sites like Blogarama and blog search engines such as Technorati and Google blog search to read other users blogs, generate ideas and find inspiration.

One final word of advice before you take the step toward a successful blog, have fun with the blog.  A blog is meant to be conversational and informative.  Imagine yourself at a networking event using the same language you would use while writing a memo or press release.  Chances are that you will not be the life of the party.  Now picture the guy making jokes and capturing people’s attention.  You want your blog to be funny, informative and interesting just like the fun guy at the party.  So sit back, relax, and get ready to blog!

Q, Mike and I facilitated a focus group yesterday- the objective of which was to find out what small business owners want to know about technology, websites, the whole works. The group ranged from self appointed “power users” to two guys just starting out on the long road to becoming tech-savvy.

I was not surprised that it was the less tech-minded members of the forum that provided us with the best fodder for our upcoming “Business Technology 101” seminar. The questions posed for Q and Mike reminded us how confusing all the tech terms can sound. One young woman in the focus group commented that when her developers did take the time to explain all the intimidating terms and acronyms, 9 times out of 10 she knew exactly what they were talking about—she just lacked the techno verbage.

The terms themselves become the missing links in conversations. PPC? SEO? Huh? When Q and Vinh were training me for this job, I had to interrupt them every 7 or 8 words or so to get explanations. One day Vinh instructed me to make a “lightbox.” I glanced up to the ceiling dubiously, highly doubting that Vinh really needed me to mount a ladder and tamper with the fluorescent office lights.

Sometimes those in the tech fields forget how to communicate with “laypeople,” if you will. After the focus group, Q, Mike and I decided that a glossary of key terms was first on the agenda for the seminar presentation we’ll be giving in April.

The focus group was an excellent reminder to Q and Mike that the terms and acronyms, while efficient between two people that speak the language, can immediately raise hackles and put up walls between two people who both actually have the capacity to fully understand what a lightbox is. (It’s an online storage area for photos, p.s.)

My Baba reuses teabags. She hordes bacon grease in tin cans in her freezer, and she uses old butter wrappers to grease cooking pans. When Baba raised her six children in the post-depression era, she used cloth diapers for all of them.

What the big car companies and fortune 500s are just starting to do, my grandmother has been doing her whole life.

Though she doesn’t know it, Baba is greener than most of us. While Oprah and Katie Couric are hosting how-to-seminars on saving water by doing your dishes in the shower, Baba has been quietly watering her plants with dehumidifier water for decades.

Though she may not know it, most of Baba’s money saving techniques are also green. And in an economy that is eerily reminiscent of ’29, we all could take a page from her book.

So what can your small business do? Besides implementing “Walk to Work Wednesdays” savvy businesses are reducing their paper trails.

With Email Blasts, paper newsletters are becoming obsolete. I know, it’s a little scary when you can’t physically see the newsletters going out, when you can’t lick (or re-use, as Baba does) all those stamps yourself, but when you are able to track your readership online for a fraction of the cost of paper mailings, your wallet and your tongue will thank you.

Email Blasts allow businesses to track how many people are opening and reading their enewletters, providing an amazing insight that never existed with paper mailings. Email newsletters build loyal customers, because most enewsletters are opt-in. It’s an interest thing. And interested customers mean repeat customers, which means increased revenue for you.

Besides saving money, Email Blasts are kind to the environment. They render obsolete paper mailings’ dependence on logging for paper, and gasoline for transport. Instead, thousands of copies of your message are sent instantly around the globe leaving a minimal carbon footprint.

Though Baba has, to my knowledge, never used a computer in her life, I know she would approve, and probably blast her 100th birthday invites out online.

• The businessman who could benefit most from your blogging skills doesn’t know how to use an RSS reader.
• The company owner who needs SEO got his website on a whim as a favor to a friend.
• The best way to communicate with your clients is a blog, but none of them read them.

The biggest problem with the internet today?

The people who need it don’t have it, and most people who have it don’t know what it can do.

So perhaps a blog isn’t the best way to communicate with the mostly newbie market. Our clients and prospectives, for the most part, don’t read blogs. So why write one?

Because they will soon. The market for online services isn’t just growing, it’s growing UP. And it pays to be first.

18-year-old kids who learned HTML from MySpace, or 23-year-olds who can type 60 words a minute from instant messaging for 4 hours a day during their teen years will become the 40-year-old entrepreneurs you know today.

Many people don’t think of it like this, something I’m guilty of. They think of their market as it exists now, and consequently have a really hard time seeing their individual clients turning themselves into tech-heads.

They probably never will change, but their replacements will be very different. And they’ll expect you to be connected to the internet, and have a website that communicates what you do effectively.

Do you have one?

Selling the Show

Even for a professional writer like me, I don’t think of this blog as giving away my writing for nothing. While the internet destroys business model after business model, the smartest musicians live by the axiom “give away the music, sell the show.” I think the same can be said for company blogging.

You can read what I write here and wonder why you’re not paying to read it. After all, these are really the greatest marketing ideas of our generation (*smile*) why should I give them to you for free? Three reasons, really:

1. So you can see the quality of ideas I have.
2. So you can see how well I write.
3. So you can envision me writing specifically for you.

Number 3 is the point of everything. Blogging puts your ideas out there and if they’re great enough, a potential customer envisions having you implement those ideas specifically for her. By giving away some of the “music” (my writing and ideas) I can sell the “show” (personal writing for your company).

Others do this too. Seth releases videos of his speeches. Jason Mraz has a whole concert on YouTube. Is this effective marketing? How do you feel after watching them? Enlightened and entertained, sure, but satisfied?

Not me. I want more.

I want to sit in the crowd and laugh along with everyone at Seth’s jokes. I want to sit in the front row of the coffeehouse and get goosebumps at Jason Mraz when he hits a high note. I want to be there.

An effective blog works the same way. You give people a taste of what you do, and if you communicate it well enough they’ll want you to do it specifically for them. They want the personal experience.

And they’ll pay you give it to them.

Blogging Gives You Personal Two-Way Communication with Customers

Like I was saying in my previous post, picking the most talented firm with the best reputation is only half the battle for your clients. They need to know that working with you will be a smooth and painless process, that’s why the most successful businesspeople build personal trust first, then leverage it into long-term business relationships.

Chambers of commerce know this. After-hours mixers exist to promote personal relationships between members.  At VQC we network a lot, and we meet most of our non-referral business personally first, then turn move on to a business relationship.

People do business with people they trust, and trust is most easily won through personal interaction.

Online it’s no different. From the beginning, the internet has been so successful because it connects people.

The first stage of online marketing used About Us pages and employee profiles to “get to know” the company. But it’s tough to get to know someone through a little photo and reading that they enjoy cars.

Blogs serve as the next step in online customer interaction. Your customers get a direct line into your ideas coupled with a personal flavor. A well-written blog will read like one side of a conversation between friends.

Tech-savvy plastic surgeons have this down to a T. Their clientèle needs to trust their doctor on a personal level to feel comfortable. The doctors, in turn, make sure their big smiling faces are all over their marketing materials. If you’ve driven on 581 East recently, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Or look at this site.

A blog post with the author’s face next to it (coming soon to this blog!) shows off industry knowledge while reading like an email from a friend.

The ability to participate in the conversation through the comments is also much more engaging than simple reading. So it can be more than one side of a conversation with a friend.  Potential clients can interact with you personally and, perhaps more importantly, with each other.

People appreciate connecting with other people. More than static reading, online readers today would rather

• Talk (or listen) to someone knowledgeable
• Share stories with a group in a similar situation
• Participate in the conversation

Blogs interact with readers, which (if done correctly) turns them into customers.

In the last installment of this series, I’ll wrap up and tell you the most important thing blogging does for your business.

I’ve mentioned some of these things in passing a couple times before, but I think it’s high time for a few posts detailing exactly why blogging is so important for any business.

I have to give credit to Frank from A Personnel Connection for prompting this series. We met at our mixer on Wednesday. I mentioned that I’m the blogger for VQC and we got to talking about what blogging can do for business.

I found myself “pitching” company blogging in person, on the fly, for the first time. It’s amazing what I said, because I had never needed to put the benefits of what I do into a short, concise explanation before. (Try it, it’s exhilarating.)

But I did, and now I’ll share what I said with you. In my mind, blogging is the best (and ironically most inexpensive) way to communicate with your customers. Here’s the first reason your business needs a blog:

Blogging Establishes You as an Expert in Your Field.

No one does business with someone they don’t trust.

Whenever you enter into a contract and need the other party to follow through you’re putting yourself out on a limb. It’s a pretty big risk for a business to pay you a lot of money to do a task for them. Before anything is signed or any money changes hands, both parties must be absolutely certain the other will be trustworthy.

So how does this typically work? How do the majority of people pick someone to do business with?

Research.

If your say you’re an expert in your field, your future client can verify that extremely easily if you have a blog. Your portfolio and previous contracts are helpful indicators, yes, but a blog gives the client a direct line into your thoughts.

She has access to different kind of information to help her make an informed decision about your expertise.

Showing that you know your stuff is different from simply saying you do, and a blog is the best way to communicate your expertise. Everyone says they’re the best, or the premier, or what have you, but are your competitors actually showing through their writing that they know their industry inside out?

Now is your chance to do exactly that. Think about it: would you choose a company with no visible marketing experience to handle a very important channel of your marketing (like a website) over one with a blog that gives you marketing insight regularly?

The great blog will definitely factor in the decision.

But in the end the decision to do business with a company is about much more than professional trust and an predicting a favorable outcome. I’ll talk about that second kind of trust in the next installment in the series.

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The webinar, not quite a seminar and a little less business-esque than the conference call.  A webinar is more like attending a lecture in college minus the boring professor, 8am class times and sweatpants.  Webinars act as online meetings with multiple functions ranging from information sharing to performing training sessions.  Webinars introduce a new way to convey information to the masses and gives those with daunting To-Do lists another excuse to take care of it later.

As a tool, the webinar is as adept as any tool Bob Villa has ever promoted and perhaps more useful to boot.  Below are some possible ways to utilize webinars to benefit your business’s e-commerce endeavors.

Information Session:  The information session webinar replaces the typical seminar held at your local Ski Resort in the middle of July each year.  Instead of attending a 3-day event, why not record each speech and power-point into a webinar and email blast it.  Saving time, money, resources and convenience, the seminar turned webinar is cool and cheap!

PR Event : The webinar is capable to convey information as well as generate publicity for your company.  A recent webinar I attended through Hubspot drove me to their twitter page and home page for further information.  Combining the webinar with other online tools can generate buzz about your website or twitter page.  We all know that the more followers you have=the more publicity=more website views=cha-ching.

Training Session – With firms spread geographically around the globe, training can be a large obstacle.  Using webinar tools, like “go to meeting”, managers can achieve training goals at a fraction of their cost.  Also the webinar sessions can be saved and posted to the internet for employees to reference or to be used as future training materials.

Some places to look into webinar usage are

WebEx
GoToWebinar/GoToMeeting
LiveMeeting
Elluminate
Secure Meeting

All these can be utilized by your business and should be used with a focus on creativity and originality.  As with anything on the web, you need to stand out to succeed.  A webinar that is not intriguing, captivating or informative is like watching the congressional proceedings on public access Television; no one will want to watch.