What's Your Business Blogging Story?

We're looking for your story about your experiences blogging for your business. We're doing research to see how blogs have affected small and independent service businesses.  If you'd like to participate, use the comments to share your successes, experiences and/or lessons learned from blogging.  Here are a couple of questions to guide you:

1. How has blogging benefited your business?

2. What have you learned or how has your business been affected by blogging?

We may feature particularly powerful stories that can help other business people and we may compile the results for publication...with permission of course.

We want to hear your stories!

Comments

[Jayfro]

We would love to add more value to our customers through blogging.

What are your blog recommendations for a roofing business website?

Our website is http://www.diligentroofing.com

Thanks for your input.

[Alwitt]

An useful resource can be found at http://www.entrepreneur-journey.com

[Bud Bilanich]

Patsi, Denise:

You asked for blogging success stories. Here's one of mine. When I first began writing www.CommonSenseGuy.com, I wrote reviews of a few books that I like and that contained some common sense advice.

This led to friends asking me to review their books on my blog. This led to me getting unsolicited books from authors and book publishers to review on my blog.

I review only books that I like -- and I tell this to people who ask me to review their books. I am happy to do a review of a book I like, but I don't want to do negative reviews, so I choose to just not review a book I don't like. So far, I have turned down only two books.

This is a success story for me for several reasons. 1) I get to read a lot of interesting books for free. 2) I get interesting content to pass on to the readers of my blog. 3) My traffic has increased because people whose books I've reviewed send their friends to my site. 4) I've become known as the author of a book review blog. I even had one author tell me that a book pulicist who was pitching him, touted the fact that she could get his book reviewed by me as a selling point.

I am considering setting up another blog that is devoted wholly to book reviews.

That's one of my blogging success stories --and I'm sticking to it.

In addition to www.CommonSenseGuy.com, you might want to check out my other blog: www.SuccessCommonSense.com. This blog is devoted to career and life success.

All the best,
Bud Bilanich
The Common Sense Guy

[John Easton]

I sure do have a story. I was recently featured in an article in the March, 07 Black Enterprise Magazine citing tactics that small businesses can use to leverage the YouTube phenomenon. Black Enterprise is nationally distributed periodical hosting top-tier content for business owners and savvy individuals.

In an effort to strengthen my position as an expert in the eyes of the magazine's editors, I posted the article at my blog and politely asked my audience to read the article and if they found anything interesting to send an email to the editor (I posted a link to the editor's email address). I saw this blog campaign as a way to turn my audience into a qualified lobby on behalf of my company.

The campaign resulted in quite a few letters to the editor with 3-4 editorial letters in this month's edition being dedicated to my article.

Joan Stewart had her letter published. This tactic got the company increased visibility above the original article, a deeper relationship with the magazine editors and lots of publicity for those whose letters were published. This was a huge win for everyone involved. Contact Joan to get her take on the campaign.

John Easton
Eastonsweb Multimedia

[Home Base Holidays]

Hi Patsi & Denise

I started publishing a blog (Sept 04), http://homeexchangetravel.blogs.com as a way of providing more information to supplement that on my home exchange website,
http://www.homebase-hols.com - I don't want to confuse people visiting the website with too much detailed information and the blog is a way of giving more up-to-date and in-depth information on particular aspects of swapping homes (and also to give members' exchange offers some extra publicity).

I like writing and, when I first started the blog, I really thought that I was writing primarily for my own interest. However, persistance pays (and now several of my competitors are also blogging so I must be doing something right!) and, the main benefit of the blog for my business is that, as well as providing more information, I believe it has helped establish me as an expert in my field which, in turn, instills trust in those interested in home exchange who are then (although difficult to quantify exactly how much), more likely to join my agency.

I've also found that writing regularly for the blog (I aim to publish at least three times a week) gives me a rich source of material to use in articles in my ezine too and cuts down on the amount of time needed to compile it.

Perhaps my biggest gain from publishing a blog has been in recently winning a contract to provide a home exchange service for a well-known UK organisation (details under wraps until the site is ready to launch). I was delighted to beat strong competition, including from much larger agencies, and was told that one of the main deciding factors had been my experience and evidence of committment which the long running ezine and blog provided. So, for this reason, I definitely think it's a good idea to carry on blogging for my small business! And I'm sure glad I found your excellent blog as I know I still have much to learn.

Cheers,

Lois
Home Base Holidays

[Krishna De]

Hi Patsy and Denise - thank you for the opportunity to share blogging stories.

I will keep this brief, but if you would like to know more details, please do not hesitate to contact me.

When I established my business in the middle of 2005, I quickly realised that I would have to build my own personal brand online - not just my corporate brand.

As you might be aware, increasingly people search for the people they are going to meet not not just the company AND where we move from one company to another, people are more likely to remember our name versus the company we have moved to. That certainly happened in my case.

I then found that my name was very common on the internet as it is the name of a Hindu god - yet I am not a Hindu.

So I then started my first business blog to complement my main business.

That original blog has now become a resource for leaders in professional services firms who want to build their brand and attract more of their ideal clients.

Through the articles I have written there, I have been actively sought out by event organisers for conferences and journalists of major publications including the "Wall Street Journal". You could say my blog acts as my sales team 24/7 and 365 days of the year.

Through business blogging I have also connected with others and have a new joint venture that I have founded with two other colleagues. And guess what - the platform we are using is a blog platform to host our podcasts and articles.

Business blogging has definately played a huge part in my success online and offline.

[Carmelo Lisciotto]

Some interesting stories here...

Carmelo Lisciotto

[Vipin]

Love your website, found you through MySpace. I have been blogging for 4 years, have been tellling people to blog to help their business for years. One of the people I told to blog for real estate leads for his wife, became the biggest bloggers for real estate and he got a job as Director of Marketing for the biggest real estate company in the world.

We got tired of telling people to go to blogger to go blog, and also wanted to offer independant entrepreneurs a way to not only build a blog, but to also promote a blog. We launched MyTypes.com about 8 weeks ago, and our traffic and rankings speak for themselves. Do check out our unique platform, we wanted to offer business bloggers a free platform. Do tell us what ou think of http://www.MyTypes.com for Free business blogs If you two are interesting in partnering at some level, we should talk. We think there maybe some collaborative opportunities we are working on.

Great job on being a smart resource for business blogs.

[Meghan Pfaff]

My name is Meghan and I am doing an internship for a company called GoldenDiscs. It is a record store based in Ireland and is looking to sell their products online. First of all, I cannot even belive that they are not selling online as it is by far the new trend and has been for sometime. Anyway, I have been researching some costs they might incur but my main concern is if anyone believes this will work. Check out the website and let me know what you think. I think they can do a world of changes, especially to their website, by selling items online. Any advice??

[Jamie]

(a) #1 thing blogging has done to benefit my business is that it is the only form of advertising that I use. Folks use Google after they arrested and charged with DWI, because they are curious about how it will effect them, and what they can do to minimize the damage. My blog comes up very high in the SERPs, and very often they end up giving me a call.

(b) I think the main thing I have learned is that a good blog is about the reader, not the writer.