The Blog Studio

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.

Let the party begin! The new Diva Marketing Blog site is up and live to the world.

There are still a couple of niggly things to fix, but the main functionality is there. Still to come are a podcasts list, randomly loading quotes on the sidebar, and RSS subscription info.

As a side note, allow me to say that developing a site for TypePad is a pain in the rear. Their help system is very slow, republishing every time one makes a change is ridiculously slow, and when TypePad runs into an error, it doesn’t tell you what it is – it just says “sorry, leave a message so we can get back to you”.

When the help dept does eventually get back to you (48 hour response time?!?), they provide the content of the error message. Their system is generating the error report, why can’t they show it to me? Launch of the Diva site was delayed by about a week while we waited for responses. In every case, it was a simple fix that I could have resolved in a matter of minutes instead of waiting for days to receive the content of the error message. FRUSTRATING.

But that’s all in the past. Or more accurately, mostly in the past. We’re still waiting to find out why the category pages aren’t displaying properly…

Let’s get right to the good part. The new Diva Marketing Blog design has been finalized.

The final design is a real evolution of all the versions that preceeded it. Some of the elements that were present in the very first comp have survived all the way through, but most haven’t. The final layout is more traditional than what I first proposed, but is more suited to the task at hand.

The site should be up within the week. It’s always interesting to look look back at the design concepts to see how a final piece emerged. Let’s take a look at them here:

Design is an evolutionary process. Rarely does a design pop up complete. It takes time and hard work to acheive consistently good work. Often, clients don’t understand this; they rightly see the finished piece and think that design involves putting that piece together. It’s rare that someone outside the process would see all the iterations that went into that final piece.

If you take nothing else away from this Diva process, I hope you give your creatives the time they need to give you really great work – I assure you, they want to!

This first example was a ton of fun. Ultimately it’s not going to be used for the Diva, but I’ll find a use for it somewhere. It’s too good to toss in the dustbin!

This next example is based on feedback from Toby regarding the “awning” version I posted Friday. You can see that some some of the design elements that first showed up in the 40’s version have been included here, as have a few of the touches from scooter girl, above.

Something isn’t quite right; I need to walk away from it for a bit to gain some perspective. But I think we’re almost there!

Something wasn’t right. Andy summed it up best in the commments when he said

It makes me want to eat lots of jellybeans.

As sometimes happens (both with Divas and design), the thing went seriously overboard. It’s still worth saving, and I will be performing a bit of cosmetic surgery on it later today.

Toby and I were discussing the layout yesterday, when she hit me with this little bit of inspiration (seriously paraphrased):

I was watching a movie last night from the 40s. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could capture that black and white elegance?

Being quite sick to my stomach from eating so many jelly beans, I was very happy to oblige.

Toby’s feedback on this was:

Peter – talk about a range of talent. Very dramatic. Very 40ish. Very up town.



I’ve been staring at this and the last version. The more I look at it the more I like it.



We def don’t want to go back to the jelly bean – tho I like the playfulness. I’m thinking, perhaps this one is a bit too Joan Crawford. Maybe we need a little more Carrie Sex in the Cityish. Can you pull some of the sass/playfulness back in? Not real crazy about the top – NYC skyscraper influence?

Of course, I never know when to leave well enough alone. While working on the 40s version above, I was inspired to try to combine some of the elements from the jelly-bean version with the 40s version. This is very rough, but you might enjoy watching this progress.

Thoughts?