CT Biz Blogs

The Bigelow Tea company has entered the blogosphere.

I’m very excited about this. I’ve been working behind the scenes for Valorie Luther at Creative Concepts, doing the technical stuff and housekeeping duties that come with getting a blog up and running. So naturally we’re using WordPress.

Two of the folks at R.C. Bigelow are blogging, Cindi Bigelow, a Co-President of the company, and Bob, the VP of Sales & Marketing. Also writing is my pal Liz Strauss. She’s a community-builder par excellence.

Of course, Bigelow already has a community of loyal customers and employees, and a terrific web site. When I went for a visit to their headquarters in Fairfield, CT, I got a good feeling — this company is a joy to work with. (Plus they gave me samples of new products!)

I particularly want to see how their customers visit the blog — we’re using Feedburner for RSS, and FeedBlitz for email subscriptions. I like the explanation page Feedburner puts up if you click on the RSS link on Bigelow’s blog, and what could be easier than FeedBlitz’s email subscription form? I bet most of Bigelow’s fans aren’t very active in the blogosphere — yet. I think the subscription options will help ease them into it. But there are also plenty of bloggers who are tea-drinkers, so I’m hoping a few of you folks will drop by, check it out, and give me your honest feedback.

So, I predict interesting things from the Bigelow blog, and I’m looking forward to working on it.

Oh, and the tea is delicious, too. I love the Green Tea with Pomegranate!

For a project, I had to find some blogs in the retail space — those supporting stores, as opposed to supporting services.

I’d put blogs such as The Orthodontic Center and Andrew Ewalt’s Law Blog in the supporting services area.

I’d consider Signs Never Sleep, Lincoln Sign Co’s blog, in a middle area. The blog is certainly about a product — signs — but they’re made-to-order. I’d put English Cut in this space, too. Not sure what to call this area, though.

In the retail area, besides Aldo Coffee, and Heather at Eie Flud, who are some of the ground-breakers in this area, I found a few more.

• eHobbies
• Ice Blog, a jewelry retailer, who has some associated blogs:

• Sparkle Like the Stars
• Just Ask Leslie

And also,

• Tonic Gifts

I found eHobbies and Ice Blog through an article in DM News: Blogs and Bling Bling: Companies See More Sales, Improve Search Position

Here’s what they had to say about eHobbies:

Since adding blogging to its site in May, 5 percent of the company’s overall traffic comes from its main blog destination, www.ehobbies.blogs.com. In addition, 5 percent of all orders have recently tracked to a blog-based coupon.

The eHobbies blog looks good, but I’m not so sure the Ice blogs are “legit.”  On the Sparkle like the Stars blog, the bloggers names are totally made up, and one is a blatant imitatation of Manolo, on the Shoe Blog.  He may be fake, too, but at least he was first.

And, even though no connection to Ice, the jewerlry site, is mentioned on Ask Leslie blog, every answered question seems to end in a recommendation for a diamond pendant, earrings, or some other accessory from Ice.

Is it a black or gray kind of search engine optimization going on here?  I can’t decide. But I do think it’s tacky.

Valorie Luther, at Creative Concepts, LLC, has her new blog up and running. She’s got the blogging bug big-time, and has worked hard to understand and use blogs for herself and her clients.

She contacted me a few months ago (she found me because of this blog) and we’ve been working on offering blogging to clients who might benefit from having a business blog.

She’s had a blog for a while with her other company, White Linen Events . That blog is called Entertaining News, and it just got a beautiful make-over from The Geek Goddess (someone else Valorie found online).

Valorie started blogging the way a lot of people do — with a free blog from Blogger, for Entertaining News. She used it to learn the basics so that she could understand the issues involved in blogging.

Creative Concepts will be getting a make-over, as well, to move from the template look. Now that she understands blogging, she moved to the next level and got a Wordpress 2.0 blog on her own domain. Her web guys are working to get the main website up, but the blog is up now and she’s working on some great ideas, including offering a blogging workshop here in CT.

It’s about time things started happening here, instead of the west coast.

In keeping with today’s earlier post on what you need to do to begin blogging; #5, Read blogs, here’s a good list of business blogs.

With more and more people jumping on the business blogging bandwagon, it’s getting to the point that there is far more out there than you could ever hope to read on a regular basis. To help you filter that infoglut down to a more manageable level, here is my list of the ten most practical blogs for entrepreneurs.

I found this list via one business blog I read religiously that isn’t in the top 10, but should be: ProBlogger.

Here is a weblog from South Windsor, CT. Folks from Gerber Scientific Products created a blog using Blogger, the fastest, cheapest, and simplest way to start blogging.

They use it to showcase what their customers have done with their products, give tips, and explain features.

This is a great way to personalize a company, and connect with customers.

I passed by their building, going to and from work, for many years — never knew what they did. Now I do!