CT Biz Blogs

There are many blogging services out there, and more appearing all the time.

In the free & hosted variety, I’m most familiar with Blogger and Live Journal. But there are many more — here’s an article from About.com which lists many blogging services. Free & hosted services are the easiest and quickest way to get into blogging, but, naturally, the features are limited. (more…)

There’s some controversy swirling around the blog world the last few days. Apparently, a blogger is being sued over comments someone left on one of his blogs. Amy Gahran’s post on this subject is one of the most comprehensive I’ve found. This issue is understandably making a lot of bloggers nervous and concerned, and has sparked a lot of conversations about liability, libel, and free speech. Some bloggers are seriously considering turning off the comment function in their blogs. (more…)

A lot of bloggers begin with a free service, and there’s nothing wrong with that (that’s how I began). The one I’m most familiar with is Blogger, Google’s free, hosted blogging tool.

I’ve created a quick demo showing just how easy it is to start a blog. You’ll need to have Flash to view it, which you can download from Macromedia, here.

It’s a 1.9 MB file, so if you’re on a slow connection and you’d rather download it to view later, off-line, I’ll have a way to do that shortly.

There’s some controversy around Blogger at the moment, (more…)

I just added my email address to the left sidebar, in a way that’s designed to reduce the harvesting of this address by spammers. Instead of a direct link, I created an image of the email address at http://services.nexodyne.com/email/

There you can create an image email address for gmail, Yahoo!, and more.

As far as I know, no one has gotten spam from the folks at nexodyne, either.

Connecticut Windows on the Natural World is a beautiful weblog. In the header, it’s described like this:

There may be no place better than Connecticut to discover nature. This blog tells of local discoveries about geology, paleontology, ecology and fisheries over the past two centuries and connects them with events in the world today.

This site looks to be Brendan Hanrahan’s companion site to www.cttrips.com. Searching Google for “connecticut” and “geology” brings links to www.cttrips.com on the first page. While he doesn’t seem to need the blog to drive business to his main site, it does nicely augment it. (more…)

Here’s the second reason for having a weblog. (Read part one here)
Share your expertise

When you share your expertise and your ideas, you do three things:

1. Show your passion for your business and your chosen work
2. Build confidence in your readers that you know your subject and that you care about what you offer to customers or clients
3. Bring people to your business

(more…)

Andrew Ewalt is a solo attorney in the Greater Hartford area. His blog serves as a good example of sharing expertise.

He has articles on taxes, identity theft, and life insurance. He also has a list of links, to mostly legal blogs.

But those links make it less clear for whom these articles are intended. Reading the articles, I get the impression that they’re for clients and the general public. But if that’s the case, he might do better by having a list of links to sites that his intended audience would find more helpful, such as financial information, tax sites, or consumer information. I doubt that most clients are really interested in the site for the American Constitution Society.

However, he might also want to be a part of the growing network of legal bloggers, a perfectly valid goal, and one that adds to the fun of being in the blogging world. In that case, dividing the links into two segments could help: legal sites, and consumer information sites.

There are many decisions to make when shaping a blog. The good news is that you don’t have to make all of them at once. A weblog is something that grows over time, just like a business.

The main three reasons for blogging are listed at the top of this site:

• Connect with your customers
• Share your expertise and thoughts
• Build your business

What does that mean? I’ll tackle these one at a time in a series of posts. (more…)

Here’s an article from the San Francisco Chronicle on the business of blogging.

It’s a good overview of what some small businesses are doing and how it’s helped them.

Some analysts suggest that blogging presents an ideal marketing opportunity for small business — that blogging is in fact better suited to the needs of small firms than large ones.

“For small, small businesses that have little money for advertising and don’t have a Web site, a blog can become your Web presence,” said Paul Chaney, an Internet marketing expert with Radiant Marketing Group in Mississippi