Here’s a really interesting article from Darren Rowse at Problogger about strategies to improve subscriber numbers to a blog. What jumps out here is the importance of taking a stand on something – saying something controversial – that polarises opinion.
If you had a Gun against your Head to Double your Readership in Two Weeks, What Would you Do? – An Interview with Tim Ferriss
Technology: Blogging as a Web 2.0 Entry Point or You Still Have Time to Catch the Cluetrain!
Here’s a great article about the importance of having a conversation with your customers. For many businesses, an open, public dialogue can be a frightening concept. But the benefits can be immense. When a business is willing to have such an authentic conversation, the levels of trust it develops with its customers provide advantages that far outweigh the often unfounded fear of a negative comment finding its way to a public blog.
Technology: Blogging as a Web 2.0 Entry Point or You Still Have Time to Catch the Cluetrain!
Maybe a blog is not the best option
In his post entitled 23 Questions for Prospective Bloggers – Is a Blog Right for You, Darren Rowse of Problogger suggests that blogs don’t suit all situations. Of note, he mentions that some web audiences are best suited to web forums, where people can start their own discussion topic rather than responding to a conversation started by a blogger. In the context of a giftware shop, this is a thought provoking point. Would people respond better to someone discussing the merits of crystals or incense, or would they prefer to start their own threads about something that was mutually interesting for each other?
Another point he raises is the importance of having regularly updated, informative (and entertaining?) information posted to the blog. In the context of a primarily bricks and mortar focussed business, this may prove problematic. Issues may arise about who becomes “blogger-in-chief” and where their information will be sourced. These are fairly typical resourcing issues faced by most businesses when opening up a new avenue to the market and are certainly not insurmountable.
Where does that leave our project? I believe it now rests in a broader context of site content generally, and what sort of content would be most attractive to visitors to the site. Stay tuned as I start to research what this content may be and how we’d go about bringing it online.
Just do it
Rather than wait around until I design the perfect site – which could take the rest of my life – I’ve decided to get something online for the business. It will be a simple “brochure” style site with 4 or 5 pages and some static content. Although it’s nothing flash, at least it gives the business an online presence. But the question of how we can utilise the power of the web to build an online business still remains.
I read a great article today from a Jon Symons entitled Why I’m Giving up on Making Money in which he suggested that money was a poor motivator and that there are other much more fundamental reasons why you’d want to build a website and write a blog. His thoughts are endorsed by Darren Rowae at Problogger in his post Giving up on Making Money where suggested that it’s best to focus on providing content that will solve a readers problems. Although he concedes that this can be a frustrating – and at times unprofitable – way to proceed he suggests that it’s the best way to proceed. Although many of the comments attached to this post argued that it’s important to focus on making money one of the more thoughtful posts suggested that content is king, and that leads to traffic, which then leads to a pre-sell and that leads to an income stream. Makes sense.
Where does this leave the website for our retail business? Well it all comes back to that Marketing 101 discipline of market research. We have an existing customer base, we sell products in real life, and now the job is to find out what customers would want to know about online. It would be worthwhile to listen to the sorts of questions customers ask about products in store, especially the more obscure requests that can’t easily be answered. Perhaps a little bit of in-store market research wouldn’t go astray.
I’m a skeptic
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