CT Biz Blogs

I’ve gone to two blogging conferences this year — BlogHer and the Blog Business Summit.

BlogHer was about the blogging experience, focusing on how it relates to women, of course. The Blog Business Summit was about how to understand blogs — what they can do for businesses and how they’re being used today.

The people I met at BBS seemed to be either from PR & Marketing firms, or from big businesses. I met very nice people from Visa International, Nordstrom, and Mastercard, to name a few of the big corps that are checking out blogging.

These folks are still figuring out how best to use blogs — some want to use it internally, some to converse with customers or suppliers.

There were some small business bloggers at the panel on blogging for small businesses, moderated by Jory Des Jardins. The panelists included Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog, Stan Mackey, (who’s real estate blog I wrote about in June) But for some reason, I personally didn’t meet any folks from non-tech and non-PR smaller businesses who wanted to use blogging to help them.

On the attendees list of the conference, I also found:

• Verity Credit Union’s blog
• Phil Mann’s IP Litigator blog

So I know a few of these folks were there, I just didn’t try hard enough to find them.

I think some of the early feedback from the conference was that people wanted to hear more case histories and stories from larger companies who were blogging, not tech insider stuff (but I love that techy stuff!). Perhaps there should be a track on that as the conference grows. These folks wanted to know how other companies handled the internal resistance to blogging, for example.

This conference is something smaller businesses who are thinking about blogging should check out, too.  The price for the conference wasn’t bad, especially if you got in on the early-bird rate.  Of course, for Connecticut and environs, Seattle was a long way to go.

I think there’s still plenty of needs that these conferences can address for large and small businesses. But Blog Business Summit is definitely on the right track! I’m glad I went and I look forward to the next one.

But I never did find out why “Blog Business Summit” and not “Business Blog Summit.”

I’m doing some work for Valorie Luther, of Creative Concepts, helping her with a new blog for the Fairfield Orthodontic Center, in Fairfield, Connecticut.

We set this one up a bit differently, with a static front page, and not one, but TWO blogs, all done with WordPress. One blog, found on the We are talking page, is where Dr. Thomas Christie, his staff, and parents will be providing posts, and the other is a blog for the kids, where Dr. Christie’s patients will be chiming in with posts about their experiences.

The site was built and designed by the talented Geek Goddess. I’m taking care of the site maintenance stuff — tweaking WordPress, general admin, adding plugins and so on.

It’s just been up a few weeks, so there’s still lots I need to do.

This is my idea of fun, folks!

Update 10/15/06: Due to some problems we’re having with the site, it’s down for now. Lucky for us not too many people are reading it yet — just everyone who reads this blog.;-)

Well, two of my favorite blogs were mentioned in USA Today. They have a nice article called Blogs put businesses on Web search map, with many quotes from Small Business Blog of the Day’s Brian Brown, and one of the blogs they feature is J.D. Iles’s Signs Never Sleep, the blog for the Lincoln Sign Company, in New Hampshire.

Sign-maker Joseph Iles, 37, has been blogging for two years at his Lincoln Sign Co. in Lincoln, N.H. And he’s already seen a payoff. Iles attributes $33,000 in sales last year, or about 10% of total revenue, to customers he found through his Signs Never Sleep blog.

“If you can send an e-mail, you can do a blog,” he says. “It’s simple.”

Congratulations, guys!

In the article, Brian gives examples of 4 business blogs, and the reasons why they’re good blogs, and why blogs are good for business.

And when you read the article, don’t forget to follow the links to see the blog examples, and to read the other articles. There’s a great link to a brief how-to on blogging, and a link to USA Today’s Small business blog, Small Business Connection blog, written by Jim Hopkins. It’s full of good posts, including this one on what Suzanne Hetts, co-owner of Animal Behavior Associates in Littleton, Colo is saying about her planned move into blogging.

How time flies, as they say. CTBizBlogs is one year old today, August 13th.

When I started, I’d already been blogging sporadically in other blogs, hosted by Blogger, for over a year. But I was ready for more control and more options. So I plunked down some money, bought a few domains, got a web hosting provider and started posting.

I picked WordPress for 2 reasons — it was free, and my hosting provider, Dreamhost, offered a one-click installation.

Since then I’ve learned a lot about WordPress, web hosting, and blog writing.

When I started, I was full of pent-up posts, so it was pretty easy to pick any topic on blogging and just start typing. Sometimes that resulted in a good post, sometimes not.

Also when I started, my day job was in the doldrums, and I had not much outlet for my creative energy. Be careful what you wish for there — now I have more ideas and projects than time. That’s why I’m still using the older version of the Journalized template.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned over the last year:

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Here’s an example of a real estate blog, which I got from Robert Scoble’s blog

I like how Stan Mackey integrates the blog with his website (Seattle Real Estate), and with a virtual tour of each house.

He uses the blog as a way to highlight interesting details, share funny stories, and talk about things like the “Top 10 most common items found in a Seattle home inspection”

According to Scoble, Mackey says that 65% of his traffic comes from his blog, which has only been up since May. So far, the traffic hasn’t lead to additional sales or listings, which is the ultimate goal, of course.

One of the commenters on Scoble’s post thinks Mackey needs to post more often, but hey, it sounds like he’s getting decent results the way he’s going. Sometimes a blog has to build up an archive of posts before it hits “critical mass.”

Of course, more posts are better. And more articles which show his expertise, rather than simply featuring the houses, would be good. Posts which combine both would be best.

And a webfeed (RSS) icon would help, too. He does have two feeds, but that’s not apparent from the site.

But this is a great start, and an encouraging sign — there are non-geeky people out there who “get” blogging.

So come on, Connecticut Realtors — where are you? If you need help, contact Valorie Luther, or me, and we’ll get you started.

Blogging is still a new idea to most people. And small business blogs are rare. One of the best ways to explain the benefits of small business blogs is by example; we can point to blogs by those brave, ahead-of-the-curve folks who are creating a trail for the rest of us to follow.

When I first started this blog, way back in August, 2005, I wrote about a few small business blogs. But it sure takes a lot of time to find them, and now, my problems are over.

For the past month, I’ve been subscribed via RSS, to Pajama Market Small Business Blog of the Day. Brian Brown has made it his mission to explore the blogosphere looking for examples. Here’s his goal:

Five days a week (not always the week days, depending on my schedule), I write about a small business that is blogging. I do this as a resource for other businesses to turn to in order to get ideas for their own blog.

A few days ago, Brian wrote a post on one of my favorite blogs, The Soap Blog, (and kindly mentioned CTBizBlogs) so I knew it was past time to mention how I read and enjoy Pajama Market.

PR and Marketing folks looking for examples should check this blog out. Small businesses researching blogging or looking for ideas to implement on their blogs, should read it, too. And if you’ve got a small business blog and you’d like your blog to be considered for a post, read his guidelines for what qualifies for a post, and let him know about you.

Thanks for saving me hunks of time, Brian.

(I wish I could remember how I first heard about this blog; it was probably through super-connector Liz, over at Successful Blog.)

Ok, I’ve been yammering here for 7 months now about blogging for small businesses. Today I want to direct your attention to another small business blogger out there — one who’s blogging as he builds his online business, months before he’s ready to open.

Mark Nash is building an online store, and blogging about it as he goes along. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the work he’s putting into his e-commerce site, and his latest post, Why Should a Small Business Blog, gives some of his reasons for why he’s blogging. Here’s a brief glimpse of a few of them

1. Creating pre-grand-opening awareness.

For a small online retail business with only a modest outlay for online advertising, then, the challenge is to create advance awareness without spending a ton of cash.

Marketing is certainly one big reason for blogging. I like this twist; I hadn’t thought of it.

4. Getting good advice.

As I continue describing my activities in the time leading up to the launch of the business, I am inviting criticism and discussion. Some of it will be good advice, some of it not so good, but all of it will be worth giving some consideration to.

People are curious, and they love a good story, especially one that’s unfolding before their eyes. This guy is a savvy blogger. (Although he’s using Google’s Blogger platform! He’s got a few reasons for doing so, but really, Mark, Blogger is so limited. If you want free and simple, Wordpress.com has better tools.) My bet is that people will come to his blog and won’t be able to resist participating, via the comments.

I know plenty of people will be coming via the link from Darren Rowse, of Problogger. That’s how I got there.

Check it out!

On Friday, I mentioned that I’d found a new Connecticut small business blog (started in November, 2005), Hadley Spagna Photography.

I ended by saying that there were a few things that bugged me. This was a bit harsh; I didn’t mean to say I thought she was doing anything wrong, just that I believe there are some things she needs to think about doing better.

 One thing I noticed is that her main web site is in Flash. I don’t like a lot of Flash on web sites for several reasons, but the main one is: lack of opportunity to optimize your site for search engines.  Maybe this will change one day, but right now, search engine crawlers (spiders and ‘bots who go looking for text) can’t read what’s in Flash.

 That’s because a web page that has Flash is actually just a “wrapper,” a shell with a link to the Flash file itself, which is a special, proprietary Macromedia Shockwave Flash file. If your browser has the Flash plug-in, it can play the Flash file, but web crawlers can’t parse the text in a Flash file the way they do with regular web pages. Well, Google claims to be able to, to a limited extent. But for most search engines, the text in Hadley’s web site doesn’t exist. Yes, there are some keywords in the title of the page on her web site (up at the top), but basically, that’s it for keywords on her web site.

On the other hand, people can’t copy images, if they’re in Flash. This is a valid concern for photographers.

 My recommendation to people who want Flash, is to only have it in selected sections, such as the photo gallery.  There are non-Flash ways to get fancy effects, such as sliding text.

Here’s an article with more techy detail on Flash and its SEO limitations.

Of course, having a blog helps a lot with that search engine optimization (SEO) bit. One way to maximize your “findability” is to really work the blog, even more so when you have a web site that can’t help you much with SEO.

So for Hadley’s blog, I’d recommend something other than Blogger. Blogger is fine for experimenting, but to really get the most out of your blog, hosting your own is best, or using a blogging tool that has more features than Blogger, such as Wordpress.com or Typepad.

 One essential thing to implement in a more full-featured blog application is the use of categories or tags.  I’ll write more on what those are at a later date, but the important thing to know is that categories and/or tags will help readers by organizing the posts in a more contextual way, and will help bloggers by giving them more keywords which are repeated on each post (namely, the category titles).

If you want to use Blogger, there are some Blogger hacks to add categories. I haven’t tried them out myself, yet.  They’re not easy to implement for novices, though. You have to tweak the template a bit.

So, once again, blogging comes to the rescue!  Got a less than optimum web site? No problem! You just have to work that extra bit harder to maximize the search engine “juice” you can get from having a blog. 

In scouring the internet in search of example blogs for small businesses, I found Hadley Spagna Photography (Actually, I just searched through CT Weblogs site.)

Hadley is a photographer, specializing in maternity and children photos. She’s got a regular website (just re-vamped) and a blog on Blogger.

Her blog is very informal and while it does have some photography, it’s a combo of a lot of things:

• info about cameras
• example pictures of her children
• info on where you can see her photos (such as Border’s)
• writing about child-friendly local restaurants and getting a child’s hair cut

It may seem like the last item is off-target – a miscellany of writing about things that don’t have a lot to do with photography, but she’s not just showcasing her photographic skills. She’s also showing her relationship skills and the fact that she gets kids and knows what to do with them – she knows how to bring out the best.

She’s showing that she has both an artistic eye to capture the right moments well, and a parental eye to know what that moment would look like.

There’s nothing wrong with putting in as much personal commentary or detail as you feel comfortable sharing. It’s not unprofessional if done correctly.

Amy Gahran, a professional blogger and explorer of new media, has done a survey on the issue of bringing personal info into a business blog. Also check out the analysis of write-in responses to the survey.

In Hadley’s blog you get to see that she is a mom, that she understands kids, and that the experience of hiring her is going to be the complete opposite of the slap-the-kid-in-a-suit, prop-him-in-up-in-front-of-a-fake-background, and make funny “ooga-ooga, squidgy-squidgy-woo” noises until the kid stops screaming, and then snap the picture experience.

That’s a good thing!

That being said, there are a few things that bug me, or that I think could be done better. But I’ll have to postpone that analysis until Monday’s post – I’m out of time. See you then!

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.

Integrated Health Management is another blog I’ve been working on with Valorie Luther, at Creative Concepts. It’s yet another WordPress.com blog. Anthony Gordon, the principal, is new to the blogging world, but he fearlessly leaped in with no coaching from me. Here’s what IHM is all about:

In a nutshell, Integrated Health Management prevention and disease management services align local physicians, health professionals and fitness leaders through a more precise collaborative care model. This supports the interests of employers, health plans, patients, and network providers to produce highly cost effective care for ambulatory outpatients who are chronically ill or at high risk!

Consulting services such as this need to be blogging. Expertise is a must in consulting, and what better way to demonstrate that than by writing posts about the issues in the field, the challenges potential clients face, and how he’s helped other clients provide better care.

Anthony is ahead of the curve, and I’m sure that as his blog grows, he’ll find that it helps him connect with clients, share his expertise, and build his business.

I love it when a plan comes together!

I’ve been working with Creative Concepts to create a blog for Matthew Cossolotto’s book, HabitForce!, and his workshops. It’s up and running, and I’ll be providing the technical assistance and blogging know-how so that Matthew can concentrate on the writing.

We decided to use WordPress.com for the blog — it has more features than Blogger in some areas, such as built-in anti-spam protection via Akismet.

Matthew is a natural at blogging — 15 minutes after I emailed him his login information, he had the first post, about his upcoming radio interview, already published. Part of that is due to WordPress’s ease of use for writing posts, but it’s also due to Matthew having a lot going on, a lot to say, and a willingess to try new things — to explore and experiment. As a writer, speaker, and teacher, he’s exactly the type of person who needs to have a blog.

It’ll be interesting to watch as his blog grows and becomes part of the blogosphere and I’m excited to be a part of that. Within the bounds of client confidentiality, I’ll share what I can, here.

For my case study post (for the 20 blog types marathon) I want to take a look at Andrew Ewalt’s Law Blog. One reason is that he’s a CT lawyer from near my old stomping grounds (he’s in Manchester and Storrs; I lived in that area for many years). For another, he’s a good subject for my experiment — he’s headed in the right direction with his blog, but it could use a few tweaks. For a third, I’m in the process of redesigning this blog, and thinking objectively about someone else’s blog is easier than thinking objectively about my own. This will get my brain going in the right direction. So, I have a few thoughts on Andrew’s blog that I’d like to share. Do with them what you will, Andrew.

I’ll be writing about three parts of Andrew’s blog:

1. The URL
2. The Header
3. The Posts

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For a while now, I’ve wanted to find out more about the Lincoln Sign Co blog, Signs Never Sleep, so I chose J.D. Iles for my interview post of the 20 blog types. I’ve never met the man, but I sent him an email, asking if he would mind answering a few questions about his blog.

He replied that he gets requests like that all the time, and doesn’t have time to do a full interview (between the signs and the blogging he’s a busy guy) but he pointed me to a series of posts he did in January and February of this year, on blogging and the SNS blog, and said he could answer a question or two in addition to that.

That’s fair enough, I think. So I decided to do a slightly different kind of “interview” and use the power of the blogosphere to pull from those posts. I don’t think I pulled anything out of context, but I recommend that you go read the entire posts for the full story. (more…)

Even though The Soap Blog isn’t a Connecticut blog, it’s an excellent example of what Connecticut business bloggers could be doing, too! This series of posts is also a fascinating look into the creative spirit that anyone with an ounce of creativity can relate to.

Right now, Heather is writing a series of stories about four scents she created to pay tribute to four women who influenced her.

In a previous post, she mentioned that she was working on a scent called “Nora,” and gave some history of how she’s been struggling to come up with just the right “notes” for it. In today’s post, Alma, Elinor, Elsie and Nora, she has some thumbnail photos of the women, and introduces them briefly to us. Heather says:

I used these women who I knew were very different as a platform to shape the fragrance - so as to embody something for everyone - once I had done that, the actual perfume so strongly associated with that woman - I couldn’t concieve of any other name for them - any other image.

She plans to tell us more about them, as perfumes, over the next few posts. I’m intrigued, because I want to see how she works with her materials so that “…their perfumes to reflect the richness and the colour they displayed during their lifetimes - and to be a signature to their personality that any woman, every woman could share.”

I trust that these stories are authentic, because Heather is the voice of Eie Flud, and she’s authentic. She’s become so, to me, because of her blogging. As I’ve been reading her posts, I feel I know her a bit. This is what I call authentic marketing — telling a real story, not only of the women, but of how Heather works, and how passionate and knowledgeable she is about what she does.

As she tells us about the perfumes, I hope she tells us a bit more about the women’s lives, also. Or maybe she’ll blend the two strands into one story, the way she blends her ingredients.

For small, small businesses that have little money for advertising and don’t have a Web site, a blog can become your Web presence…

I mentioned this excellent article back in August. It’s a great introduction from the San Francisco Chronicle to why small businesses should blog.

One of the examples they cite is the Green Cine Daily, a blog for GreenCine, an online DVD rental and video-on-demand company.

According to the article, Dennis Woo, the owner of GreenCine, has doubled his business in 2004 because of the weblog. (more…)

Some businesses, such as Eie Flud, (first mentioned in this post) have a website as well as a blog. But for some, such as CT BizBlogs, the blog is their website.

Here’s a very nice example of that. The Aldo Coffee Company has been blogging for almost a year now, and their site is very well-designed. (more…)

From my dining room window I can see grazing, the very cows that within minutes provide the milk for these soaps - still warm and frothy and completely natural. We toddle over with our basin, and toddle back to make the soap. Our thanks to the Farmers Meakin (Freeby) for providing the milk and Carl the herdsman for not even so much as blinking at our reasons for wanting it.

During my blog surfing, I found a relatively new small business blog from the UK, all about a company that makes soap. Heather Platts, of the company Eie Flud, has been blogging about their experiences setting up a shop, packaging their products, and creating soaps and perfumes. She’s also been blogging about her blog and her experiences in the blogosphere. (more…)

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…)

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.

Yet another great example, not from Connecticut, but it shows you what you could do with a weblog, if you have a restaurant.

This restaurant weblog from North Conway, New Hampshire, is very professional looking. It’s created using Typepad, a hosted blogging service.

They post about upcoming events at the restaurant and area, food, recipies, and even a video on how to eat spaghetti!

Their site is full of sidebar links and photos, including photos sent in by customers.

When you see this site, you feel as if you were there in North Conway.

Signs Never Sleep is the weblog of the Lincoln Sign Company, in New Hampshire.

They feature great photos of work they’ve done, and use an informal style which makes you feel right at home.