Some are finding these tidbits of information help in growth
By Allison Bruce
That happened to Leah Peterson of Simi Valley, who posts interviews with other bloggers as a feature on her personal site.
One of the bloggers, who has a lot of traffic on his* site, linked to her site and overwhelmed it with more traffic than it could handle. Peterson remedied the situation, but it was a reminder that an interesting post can change blog traffic levels.
Peterson has a background in photography, art and writing. She runs Crawberts.com, a Web development company, with her husband, Joe Crawford.
“Very rarely do I write about anything business-ey on my blog,” she said.
Even so, she said she found before long that her blog was leading to business connections that wouldn’t have formed otherwise.
“We don’t have to advertise as much,” she said. “We don’t have to go out looking for work as much. The word of mouth spreads instantly.”
The blog became a good place to contact people and network.
She recently posted a job ad on her blog looking for programmers — then took the opportunity to talk about those things they were looking for beyond what was mentioned in the ad, such as integrity, a strong work ethic and “know your stuff as well as you say you do.”
Peterson said there is a balance between being honest and creative while still being careful about what she posts. She makes sure to ask clients if they are OK with her mentioning contract work in the blog.
When she goes looking for people, Peterson said, one of the first things she does is look for a blog or personal Web site. She expects that others do the same.
“I think people want to know what the people are really like behind the business,” she said.
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*Heather is not a man. Interesting to me that it would be assumed that she was…..
Perhaps they were referring to Jon Armstrong’s linking to your post, and missed that Heather also linked. just a thought. Happy Friday!
I didn’t catch that article but will look for it. I’m interested in the whole phenom of “blogging for busines” and think it has great potential for cutting through much of the elitist style media bullshit like Fox News, etc. It’s interesting to see serious journalists blogging as well as a whole culture of bloggers who write about real life and family issues.
It would be interesting to see more online “magazine” types of sites, only because I’d like that personally.
And, although, I love reading dooce and a few other mommy blogs that deal with things that I will undoubtedly have to deal with in the future, I am concerened when families are written about, that it seems that it can become something like “The Truman Show”. It’s fun for everyone to watch and it’s a great social experiment and the writer can get paid as well, for their work. But “Truman” didn’t give his concent to have his life cronicled publicly. There are pros and cons but in the end, some of the families or children seem to be just like “Truman” except on Sherman Avenue instead of in a big giant dome. Hopefully, though I’m sure not, there is no manipulation of people to better the storyline as their was in the Truman movie. I guess the upside is that if someone is making money from blogging, then their family, even the unconsenting among them, are benefitting financially as well and having read dooce I’m sure she’s making sure that her child will have a large part of the monetary rewards set aside for her daughter’s future, so how can that be bad?