Earlier today, Lucia and I gave a talk at WordCamp Toronto about the changing blog design marketplace, and the opportunities that we see for professionals delivering services using WordPress. Below are the slides from that talk.
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m really jazzed up about the unexpected benefits blogging for business invariably seems to create. I’m going to put together a series looking into this in more detail. I’d like to begin by soliciting your stories. I’m looking for some bloggers to interview, either via phone, skype, email, about their experiences with the Whoa! factor.
I’ll start with my own story. I started blogging in October 2004. I was laid up recovering from surgery (blown disc), and looking for something to do to keep from going stir crazy. After reading an article extolling blog design as a way to learn about designing for complex data, I thought I’d give it a try. I called my site Almost Cool, and proceeded to write about how I’d built the site, my thoughts on design, and observations on life in general.
To make a long story short, I met a bunch of amazing people. How? Through comments left on my blog, through articles I read on other people’s sites, through conversations that started by email, then moved to IM, and in some cases meeting face to face. Those connections started to lead to work: a designer I know was too busy to handle a new work request, so he handed it off to me. People started finding me via search engines, and that led to more work. The busier my site got, the busier my freelance business became.
I realized that blogging can have a pretty significant impact on business, regardless of your industry. I thought “Hmmm, there’s an opportunity here – an opportunity to help business people use blogging as a tool to build their contact base, to get in front of potential new clients, and to grow their businesses”. While there were a handful of design studios turning out excellent designs for personal blogs, at the time there wasn’t anyone putting serious effort into blog design for businesses. So I launched The Blog Studio.
The thing to note here is that I wasn’t looking to start a business. I was fresh out of design school, and wanted to go to work for an established studio in an effort to build my experience and my resume. This business was an unexpected benefit of my blogging.
There have been a bunch of other Whoa! moments in the past two years. I’m going to save them in case no one responds to my call for stories! If you’d like to share, leave a comment or send an email to peter at theblogstudio dot com.
This is part two of a case study answering the question “Why should a Registered Massage Therapist blog?”. Part one can be found here.
To recap, we’re reviewing the scenarios in which our RMT would benefit from blogging. As we don’t know his specific circumstances, we’re conducting a series of “what-ifs”. This is the first.
Scenario 1: grow his small business
Search
Reputation
Brand builder
Unexpected opportunity
Connection and Loyalty
Let’s assume that our RMT’s clinic or service is good – at least as good as his competition. If it’s not, blogging is not what he needs to be worried about.
Let’s also assume that our dude is in a major metro area. The value of local search is relative to the business’s surrounding population.
The fact is that blogs rank well in search engines. There are a number of reasons for this:
So all of the above will help our fellow’s phone to ring.
Reputation is a big factor here too. RMTs tend to grow their business via referral. The strength of a referral is increased each time it is heard. Meaning if 247 friends told me, I’m just going to have to try his clinic the next time I need some fixing. Blogs can help a reputation grow dramatically, with broad reach.
Brand building goes hand in hand with reputation.
Unexpected opportunity will present itself via blogging. This has happened to EVERY SINGLE BLOGGER I KNOW. It’s neither spooky or mystical, nor does does it come from a very current fortune cookie . It’s just your network making connections in ways you hadn’t imagined. It’ll happen unexpectedly (‘natch).
Connection comes from people reading your words. Loyalty comes from people getting to know you. Even just a tiny bit. Blogs help build relationships, and relationships help build business.
Part 3 coming shortly…
We received an email this week from a Registered Massage Therapist, asking how blogging could help his business. It’s actually been a while since I’ve answered that question, and I’m interested to see how my outlook on blogging for business has changed in the past year.
For a point of reference, I give you A Guide to Business Blogging, written by yours truly almost exactly 12 months ago.
There’s an exuberance to that document that is not present today. For one, it’s insanely hot and humid this week. For another, I’ve experienced a darker side to blogging – one I hadn’t been aware of when I wrote my Guide.
So, let’s take a look at the question: how can blogging help our RMT’s business?
To start, we’ve got to establish what it is this fellow wants to get out of his marketing efforts. Is he looking to grow a new business? Does he work for someone else, but want to grow his clientele? Does he want to change the nature of his practice (for example he may want to promote his specialty in sports rehab or motor vehicle accidents)?
Blogging can have a significant impact on all of these, but the strategy may differ according to the desired outcome.
Next I’d explain to him that blogging is in its essence a networking tool. It’s a way to make qualified connections based on trust and relationships. It’s a doorway to unexpected opportunities. It’s the most cost effective information distribution system ever created. It’s also a lot of work.
I’d show him that blogging at its best is a conversation between the writer and reader. But it’s not any old conversation. Remember the old shampoo ad where the woman says “So I told two friends”, and her friends say “And I told two friend”, and those friends say etc etc? Well blogging is like that – only it’s “So I told 247 friends”. You do the math.
“And what’s more”, I’d say to him, “that conversation will be around forever.” Then things would get quiet, fast. [aside: It’s an interesting psychological experiment to observe what happens next. The paranoid and quick tempered start to get all twitchy. The marketers think “woooooooowwww. This conversation will have a geometric effect that lasts (and potentially increases) over time.”] This is one of the dark sides of blogging. It is literally true that what you write on your blog will probably be around and accessible for ages to come (optimist here).
“This means”, I’d explain next, “that you want to make sure you’re ready to commit the time before you see the results.” If not, your half baked attempt at being useful to your audience failed. Not so good.
Because you do have to offer something of value to your audience. You will be fighting for eyeballs in a world with billions of distractions a mouse-click away. It takes good content – something they can use – to earn an audience. And it takes consistency to keep that audience.
With a commitment to a couple of hours per week though, I believe our RMT can build a network of the people he wants to be talking to.
In the following parts, I’m going to review a couple of possible scenarios, and demonstrate how blogging can help our guy meet his goals. I’m going to start each scenario with a list of blogging effects, ranked from most to least important as it relates to the goal. I’ll then review those effects.
