Panel: Does Your Blog Have a Business?
Phoebe Espiritu
Eric Rice Founder, Audioblog.com
Shaun Inman haveamint.com
Jeffrey Zeldman Founder, Happy Cog Studios
DL Byron Principal, Texturadesign Inc
General points:
Inman: Started by building a community… something that is common among all the panel participants.
Byron: A new market came to us that we didn’t know existed – “accidental entrepreneurship”.
Rice: Things are still evolving, but it is very important to have original content.
Espiritu: Talked about “situated software” and, if I got this straight, it’s when a person has know-how to solve something, but not all of the necessary knowledge. The online community then helps you connect to the missing parts. Cited as an example was an experiment with publishing online content and ideas as PDFs. The goal was to see how far it would spread. She says that real businesses are now using this technique (Before & After magazine, for example.)
Zeldman: Primary motivation for blogging was the ability to express self, not money. Says that contrariousness is a good thing. just pick someone you want to “kill” – someone who you think you’re better than providing information, a product, a service, etc. Then, set about the business of beating them at their own game.
Byron: Didn’t run live commenting on his blog for a long time because of comment spam. Is doing so now, because there now are tools to eliminate comment spam.
Inman: IS creator of haveamint – a Web site analysis tool. also, creator of shortstat – a Web site statistics utility. Inman says that he likes having is ideas challenged. He is a big proponent of viral posting, which creates buzz, and says there is great value in good Web design.
Espiritu: Entrepreneurs naturally want to fix something that’s broken.
Byron: Businesses want to know how this Blogosphere thing works.
Rice: Not everything created for the Web has to make money.
I asked the panel the following question: How much energy did they expend building their community of users? Did they go find the users, or did they find the sites?
Byron: The key was to keep putting content out there, content that is keyword-rich, that uses smart mark-up language. Use keywords in post titles. How-to content is also a great way to build traffic. It’s okay to ask for shared content and to ask for blogging relationships.
