BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Many resources recommend having a blog and creating content in order to position yourself as an expert in the field. Blog attracts attention to the product you are selling giving it a contextual boost from the content you are writing. In most cases, people who know the most about the product or service are those who run the business. They are so busy creating the product or service, dealing with clients and suppliers or whatnot that they simply don’t have time to create quality content.

Sure, you can hire a blogger, ghost writer or just an English-major intern to write stuff for you. Problem is – he doesn’t know the product. He doesn’t have the feeling for the product, like the owner has. There is no passion, no interest (except for being paid) and no understanding of how to present your product to the readers. Those readers, who later may become customers. It’s all about presentation, after all. So blogging becomes new sales tool that the owner doesn’t have time (or some times skills) to use.

What we recently started doing is we offer our clients to keep their blogs for them. We know the product, since we worked on presenting it for so much time. We know the target audience, since we’ve been talking to them since the launch of client’s web site. And we have interest in promoting clients’ businesses, since it means more business for us.

Everybody wins. Except for the guy who’s hands are full already.

Looks like we’re a little late to the party, but it doesn’t mean we can’t have our chunk of fun. In addition to the blog we set up earlier for Don’t Date That Guy – not just one, but two more blogs emerging on our servers.

One will be in Russian (sorry, folks), and will deal with weight problems that Russian immigrants (especially of older age) are dealing with. Unfortunately, their life in former Soviet Union wasn’t as bright as our lives here and now. Science of dieting was not popular and not many people could afford to eat as healthy as we are now. So, we hope that by creating this web site we will provide valuable and necessary information for our own parents and relatives. Stay tuned, the launch is scheduled for February.

Second upcoming blog (hopefully) will launch approximately at the same time. It is targeted to a more younger crowd, people who are bored with existing places they go out to, but not sure where to go instead. Now, don’t confuse it with Zagat survey, it will look more like Events section from Village Voice then CitySearch listings. Plans are (so I heard) to include a lot of free or very inexpensive places. As it turns out not – not every 20-year old kid drives a Ferrari and makes a fortune on eBay.

Not sure if disclosing our future plans is a good idea, but it would be a nice experiment to see how things turn out. Zealus Web Design always tries to support our customers’ ideas and provide them with insights and knowledge of things they would otherwise have a hard time figuring out.

When choosing a Content Management system for your web site it is usually a good idea to ask yourself – what is the problem you are trying to solve?

Most people (as I noticed on several message boards) make same mistake – they try to figure out what software they need to make money online. “I want to create a community, what software do I need?”. First of all – what kind of community is it going to be? Writers? Photographers? Make-up artists? Everyone has a different requirement, and different level of knowledge. Photographers are a little easier to please, as they are used to complicated and cumbersome camera controls, but try to cater same interface to a community of models and make-up artists (same industry, after all) and you will be hit with an outcry for mercy.

Management 101: Before offering a service think – what is the problem the service is going to solve. If you have the answer to this question – you will find tools in no time.