The Blog For Entrepreneurs

Most people who have offline businesses already have web sites, that is a given, but what I have been evangelistic about over the last two years with all my friends has been to make a change in their thinking process.

You see most of the web sites that I see, even of friends of mine, are £5000 affairs, well designed, great shop windows and very corporate. The one thing most of them have in common is that they do not provide any benefit other than to look nice and get the odd enquiry. I even have one friend who paid upwards of £30k for their site… and it has provided virtually zero leads. I will not share it with you to save his embarrassment… you know who you are!!

What I will do in this post is give you, if you are one of these, a business boosting few tips in how to get started creaming your competition. The first thing is to start a blog. Get over yourself that blogs are for kids and you are ‘every-so-corporate’. The point of your website should be to do business, give a great image and engage your customers. Your blog will do this, you current site isn’t – no matter what your web designer is telling you.

Starting a Blog Could Transform Your Offline Business

Put it this way, if I had known what I know now about blogging platforms and lead generation and capture, I would have doubled business previously and you can too. First thing to do is tell your web designer to download WordPress onto your server and get busy installing it. It couldn’t be easier so don’t let your web guy tell you it will take two days and cost £1000! It is free and it takes less than 10 minutes.

Then you need to choose a theme. (here is a good resource) This is basically how your site will look and the functionality you want on it. Let me tell you why I chose the theme I am running on this site:

1. It was easily customisable in the header - our ‘One Life : No Fear’ title didn’t take too long and to a professional web guy it would be minutes in the making.

2. It had social networking functionality with Twitter (at the bottom) built in. It is an easy way for the blog to connect with my Twitter page.

3. It had Flikr installed. Flikr is a photo storing site, where I can upload images from my everyday life. For me it is a way to connect with my readers. As a business you may want to use this application differently than I do. For example, it could be used to introduce employees, show your facilities, or even (God forbid!) show the human side of your business with a few images of things going on in the office.

4. The sidebar had a video link which I just copy and paste videos I would like to shares with my readers. You could have instructional videos there, training videos, products videos, anything.

5. The theme is ‘widget ready’, this means that I can install plugins for WordPress easily enough. Basically plugins are extra functionality such as the ‘Top Commentators’ plugin. This plugin encourages people to comment, because if they appear on this list they get a link from my site. The presence of the plugin shows new visitors that my site is not ‘dead’ that there is a community of readers here. It will do the same for your business.

There were many reason for choosing my current theme, you may have different objectives, but remember, you are trying to build a site that ‘engages’. Don’t just build a blog that is the same as your one dimensional web site was..

I am not trying to put my blog forward as an example of how to do it, it is far from complete and I take advice on changing it all the time. However it generates leads and yes… it even generates a small amount of income although it has only been around a few months.

All I can tell you, as an entrepreneur with a ‘shop front’ type site, is that you can do much better for much cheaper. For example, if I was going back into the commodities trading business I would create a blog and fill it with free audio and video training on how to trade commodities. I would create an eBook that gives massive amounts of trading strategies and technical information on how to understand the commodities market and I would give it away free for the users email address.

I would then send lots more free information on trading… see where I am going with this? My firm was spending at least £20,000 per month on direct mail to capture our client base, after I sold up this carried on to upwards of 18,000 people… imagine if we were doing that business now and spending even half that on our site and creating a list?

In my experience, bricks and mortar entrepreneurs believe that there is nothing wrong with their online strategy. Many will look at the £5000+ they have spent on a site as well-spent because the site looks great but they are overlooking the possibilities of engaging in a ‘Web 2.0′ fashion.

The ironic thing for offline entrepreneurs, especially in this current environment, is that their current marketing strategies, if coupled with a proper blog presence, would probably work out cheaper than the offline marketing they are doing right now.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Regards
David
@OneLifeNoFear