Express Marketing Memo

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Here’s some encouragement for any of you thinking about starting a blog, but not yet ready to get your feet wet. Andy MacDonald says, “Go On, Start Blogging Now.”

The advice to “start blogging now” is really quite consistent with a carefully thought-out and competently executed business blogging strategy. The experience gained from launching, designing, and posting to a simple “starter” blog is a critical component in the obligatory “data gathering” phase of developing an informed business blogging strategy.

He goes on to say that you can’t effectively plan your overall blogging strategy until you’ve had some relevant direct experience. I agree.

And while you’re at it, have some fun with it. Experiment with a couple of different blog platforms. I’m partial to WordPress, but you may prefer Typepad or Blogger or one of the other options available through your Web host.

Don’t get too hung up on design at this point. Instead, focus on your message. What is it that you want to communicate to your audience? Learn how to draw your audience in to a conversation.

Read the rest of Andy’s post here.

Photo Credit: Mike Licht on Flickr (Creative Commons)

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I use an unconventional method to plan the architecture of a website. It’s about as low-tech as you can imagine. Today I’m applying that same method to this blog. By the time I’m finished, I’ll have a clearer picture of my next steps for this blog.

When I’m putting my thoughts together on a topic, I like to keep things free-form, movable, easily changeable. I want to see where information will flow naturally and also where different pieces of information can play off each other - the relationship of one piece of data to another. In my quest for a workable system, I’ve fiddled around with free versions of mind-mapping software, but possibly since the operative word here is “free,” they’ve never quite delivered the goods as easily as I had hoped.

The system I’ve settled on is simply sticky notes and a large work surface, usually an oversized sketch pad. I warned you that it was low-tech! I simply write the topics that must be covered on separate sticky notes, one topic to a note, place them on the work surface and look for connections, categories, and holes to fill. I’ve used this for website development, marketing plans, and now for re-evaluating the direction for my blog(s).

What tools or methods do you use for your “big picture” planning? Please share in the comment section, below.

Photo Credit: andydr on Flickr

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Have you noticed that when you lose touch with old friends, it can be really hard to reconnect? I’m finding that when I step away from blogging momentarily to focus on urgent, priority projects, that it’s also hard to get back into blogging mode. Granted, this has been more than a momentary lapse, but it was necessary to truly focus on some client projects. Thanks for hanging in there with me!

I’m frequently asked if blogging makes any difference to the small business owner - if it’s worth the time commitment. My experience is that YES, it’s definitely worth it on a couple of different levels. For one thing, it’s a growth experience for the blogger. It forces you to constantly try to get inside the head of your audience … what will you find valuable and interesting? What have I just learned that I can share with you? Who just wrote an insightful post that would benefit my readers? These are good questions for any business owner to ponder!

On a completely different level, blogging is good for business because it increases your online presence. Search engines still love blogs because they’re continually updated with fresh, hopefully relevant content. They’re fun to promote. We’ll go into detail on that in a future post, but for now, I’ll just say that it’s a joy to find truly interesting writing. When you leave a comment on an interesting post, you’ve created a backlink to your site. Yes, there’s more to it than that, but in a nutshell and for the sake of brevity that’s the basic idea.

It took about three months of consistent writing, commenting, and cross-linking with my other blogs to notice business-building results from my efforts. This blog has already helped me gain copywriting assignments and web site development projects, in addition to serving as a resource for my customers.

The other side of that coin is that blogging isn’t for everyone. It’s time consuming. Once-a-month posting won’t get the job done. You need to have something to say, be willing to reach out to other bloggers, and enjoy writing.

OK bloggers … I need your help. Do you blog for business or pleasure? What results are you seeing from your blogging efforts? How long did it take to see those results? Do you feel it’s worth the time commitment?

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Very simply put, Blog Carnivals are organized collections of blog articles around a theme. They’re a promotional tool for the blogger and an opportunity for the reader to find new blogs.

Last week’s blog post on social networking for the local small business seemed like a good fit for Bootstrapper’s Carnival of Business & Entrepreneurship. It was my first submission and I’m very curious to learn if it draws traffic to this blog.

I hope you’ll head over to Bootstrapper’s Carnival of Business & Entrepreneurship to see what the other 44 bloggers have to say. Some of the posts deal strictly with Internet Marketing. Others offer tips applicable to nearly any business.

Learn more about blog carnivals, search upcoming carnivals, and submit your own post at www.BlogCarnival.com.

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Is it really writer’s block if you have an idea, but can’t seem to form the right words around it? Is it perfectionism rearing its annoying head? Whatever you name it, the effect is the same: sentence after sentence refusing to play nice together and paragraphs that just won’t flow.

Experience has taught me to just keep writing. Eventually, by placing one word after another, the problem works itself out. Maybe I need to start at the middle, or write the conclusion and backtrack. Or maybe I need to grant myself permission to write a really, really awful first draft.

And maybe just writing about the problem is enough to let myself off the hook.

What do you do when the idea is solid, but the words won’t flow?

Photo Credit: Margan Zajdowicz

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