I'll be travelling today, seeing how my Asset Management skills could be applied in the retail world, and trying my hand at creating a blog for a small business.
The small business blog is for a friend. If it works like I'm hoping it will - and I think it will - it will be another step along the path to doing this for other people, maybe even turning it into some sort of business. A small business is a small business, but a small business blog is something anyone can visit and interact with, anywhere, anytime, creating a relationship with the business and possibly generating more business. We'll see.
The narcissistic primarily autobiographical blog of the pseudonymous d.b. echo
Hi Harold...I realize I'm pretty computer-unsavvy and relatively geezer-aged, so fairly unimpressed by a small business having a big internet presence. The whole Blog thing is something of a mystery to me. It basically appears to be writing a diary for the whole world to see or writing an unpaid opinion column. Why would a blog for a small business be an improvement over the company just having a good web site? If I'm checking out a business on the net, I want all the pertinent information on an easy-to-navigate page (had to recently point out to a local business that their website didn't list their store hours...my whole purpose for having checked their site!). I would probably feel that a business that has enough time or staff to use updating a blog regularly just has too much free time on their hands (do they make such a lousy product that they don't have enough customers to keep them busy?), or was paying someone for what amounts to "busy work"(I'll be paying more for their product to support this excess staff?)....in either case, I'd tend to NOT shop there. Can you explain the advantage of a business having a blog versus a well-done website, please? joy
ReplyDeleteJoy, I presented a lot of the arguments here:
ReplyDeletehttp://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2007/07/blogs-for-small-businesses.html
It boils down to the fact that blogs are free and easy to create and maintain by anybody. Most small business websites I've seen have either been very slick numbers that really don't give you the feel of a "small business", or crappy things where half the buttons don't work. For a website you either have to know html and other programming stuff yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. And websites tend to be static in their content, blogs are dynamic.
Once a blog gets established there really isn't much to keeping it going - a few minutes a week, maybe, to put together a new entry talking about what's come in, what's new, or what events are planned. Think of it as an open-ended newsletter that can be instantly updated. A well-done small business blog will help maintain the close relationships that small businesses have with their customers.