"I have a small village shop, my customers are my neighbours, people I see everyday. It's a simple family business, no foreign sales, I don't even sell much to the next town! Why should I invest in a weblog?"

No matter what you sell, whether it's groceries, dry cleaning, financial services or portals, you have something on the shelf waiting for a customer. Selling is the art of introducing customers to what they need when they need it, and then persuading them to buy it from you.

You can do this one customer at a time as they happen to check in with your shop, but I want to show you how you can step up to the plate and make sales happen. I want to show you how to invite customers into your business, introducing your business as part of their lives while making them a vital part of your business. Most businesses do this through advertising, through community social networks and any other means, but it's ad-hoc, random.

Let me introduce you to the newest twist in online marketing, one that's not based on abstract theory or wishful thinking, but rooted in the way we actually use Internet. Let me show you how those of us in the technical fields have been quietly leveraging social networks, and how, thanks to newer and simpler software, almost anyone can use this technology to reach their customers.

Let me teach you the fine art of the business weblog.

The World of Ends

The Internet is not a broadcast medium. Internet marketing is not about one-to-many advertising, not in any familiar sense. Oh sure, you can put up a glossy brochure page to gather 'eyeballs' off stray Google hits, and there are all sorts of web design companies lined up ready to take your money to build one for you, but ask yourself this: Do you want eyeballs?

Most of us want whole customers.

The Web is 'a world of ends'. The Internet is an invisible and undetectable aether that simply connects us to someone else. It connects us to uncountable and often anonymous someones, but someones nonetheless.

The Internet connects people. Not eyeballs. It connects people, real people, people with real lives, with hearts and minds, people we'd like to call our friends, and some we actually do. At every end point on the web, there is a person. People make these webpages, even those that hide behind a cold corporate mask, and people surf the web. The only viable strategy of Internet marketing is to connect with those people, and then engage and persuade some of them to become our customers.

We engage customers by telling them what we have, and we persuade them to buy through educating them about our products. Whether we sell aircraft to senior executives, apples to our neighbours or web portals to SMEs, all of us market our wares through announcements and education.

Becoming Known

Early in 2003 Teledynamics ran a brief weblog experiment to list business opportunities culled from brochure and database websites of local real-estate brokers. We only posted exactly what was already listed on the broker sites and with links directly to those sites, adding a few items each day. With no other advertising other than the default pings to weblogs.com, by the third day we were registering 384 page reads.

You can't begin to convince a customer to buy until you have their attention.

We all run ads in our local news papers, use storefront signs, perhaps even ads on a local radio station. All these traditional marketing methods work --- for what they do --- but these are all passive methods. Like a website that sits waiting for the golden Google query that never comes, all these other methods require someone looking in their direction, tuning in at the right moment when they speak. They don't really fit into the dialog of doing business, but, until now, they were all we had.

In the weblog world, we still make contact by broadcast, but we take an active role, we control what we say, when we say it, and we can influence where we target our broadcast by the associations we keep with the weblogs and aggregators. Since there is no extra cost and only benefit to be had, we repeat our broadcast, daily or more, and call out our barker's chant to seize the moment over and over with our brief ping. At the small scale, it's still very much like the newspaper or radio advert only in this case, in the larger picture, our ping is captured by the weblogs and rebroadcast through new feeds, echoing down the blogrolls of the web like the sound of a pebble tossed down the well. On every echo, we have one more chance of greeting that customer who needed to be in the right place at the right time, and we get these extra chances for zero extra cost. Weblogs are the epitome of viral marketing.

In addition to pushing the word out into these relay networks, weblogs also let our customers cultivate relationships with us. Call it Vendor Relationship Management -- anyone interested in your business can directly opt-in and subscribe to our signal, or, again a viral market effect, they may subscribe to some other signal that has folded yours into a broader topic. The process works like this:

1. You announce a new shipment or product on your website.
2. A small site-summary for your site is updated.
3. Your website sends an alert out to selected weblog sites.
4. The broadcast alert triggers countless robots to fetch your summary.
5. Some robots will incorporate your summary into their own and repeat from (1).
6. Some customers will directly poll your site summary.
7. Some will monitor those tertiary summaries.

Other things happen, of course. For example, if someone subscribes to 5 feeds and 3 of them recommend your business, that kinda says something about your global credibility and reputation, but that's meat enough for another essay and getting us off topic...

In the weblog ecology, there are many paths to your door. Some customers will watch your site directly. Others may subscribe to an 'aggregator' which collects many feeds and merges them into a new summary.

Weblog aggregators might be run by a regional business development office, an industry association or special interest club, a chamber of commerce or even your competitors' sites, and each combined feed might be edited and annotated or left verbatim and fully automatic (an important feature for volunteer-staffed associations) --- that one ping from your site causes them to fetch your site summary, merging your latest items into their 'new messages' roll, and they in turn may send out fresh pings. Aggregators can themselves be aggregated, the items re-sorted and rebroadcast in a new frame, and so on it goes.

Your regular customers may also monitor your business by merging your site summary into their personal aggregator using a service such as NewsMonster or RadioUserland. Because your summary file is small, they can afford to poll your page many times an hour without draining their bandwidth, and most weblog tools will detect unchanged feeds and transer only the page headers for any wasted polls.

The net result is an ecology of instant notification sales channels where your customers can track all things related to their interest, including your business. Here at Teledynamics, we can track hundreds of feeds in one simple intranet page.

Weblogs in action

Suppose you run a small village bicycle shop. Most neighbours are infrequent customers, buying items as needed or on impulse. Others are dedicated local cyclists who appreciate being told of your special deals, promotions, cycling tours or whatever else you might want to discuss.

The casual shopper finds what they seek through Google when they need you or serendipitously prompted by the community hub site. Because of Google's PageRank, the more your weblog is cited by the other related weblogs, the higher your site rises in the search standings; one famous Google analyst, when asked how one could improve their page ranking, replied, "Write good content" -- weblog ecology is what ensures that content gets known.

With that second group, the devoted fans who are your bread and butter, and for the potential fans subscribed to related feeds, your business can be tracked directly through the ping propagations of your weblog portal site summary; the people who need to know will know what you have the instant it is available because it's right there on their browser screen. No email clutter, no 'please check back for updates' it's just there, pro-active and just in time.

Making Contact

"If I could just get them in to my store ... then I'm sure I could convince them to buy!"

Weblogs short circuit corporate brochureware by being very human, very conversational and engaging. There's no need for fancy web design, no courses to take or certifications to pass, no middlemen web designers to contract. You just post what comes up as it comes up, and you own every inch of it. Weblogs also bypass the high-bidder hotlists through the ping/site-summary network. You speak directly to your customers.

When a customer enters our bricks and mortar shop, we start a conversation. It might be about the weather, or hockey, or whatever; we speak up and break the ice because we want them to know we are there. When we know them, the conversation might get going a little quicker, something about their interests, about what they've bought or looked at before.

Once your weblog has caught their attention, customers are only a click from your door, and if they grace you with their click, that exact item which attracted them is right there, first thing, no mess, no digging, no fuss. You've helped them find what they wanted to find, and that's good for your business reputation.

What could be better? A qualified lead, in your store, already holding in their hands that very thing they came to buy. You have a captive and willing audience, so now's your chance ...

The Engagement

Now the relationship begins. Right beside this item which attracted them, they find the previous item, and the one before that, and the one before that. It's contact, human contact, and it's enticing: People love conversations, and everyone who's ever been to a weblog knows how easy it is to become sidetracked into reading just one more item. They pick up where they left off and gather an instant sense of your business, but the bottom line is they are there, and you still have their attention.

Your weblog is your opportunity to tell them more about this thing they are buying, about what else you sell, about why you are so passionate about this business. This is your chance to make a connection, show them what else you offer, and teach them about what you sell and about who you are.

Because a weblog is categorized, each item can link to other related items; with a bit of practice, you learn to link older items in newer postings, leading your visitors newcomers to seeing more than just the brochure, letting them know where you came from and what you know.

The Dance

A very few large corporations have discovered something very useful about the weblog: It is the most economical focus group ever invented. Why base the risk assessment on a new product line on some marginally applicable statistical sample when you can simply ask the customer what they think? Like the art of business, the art of blogging is an art of conversation.

Part of the success of the weblog is the ease of publishing, part of it is the human face of it, and part of it is those steady and persistent droplets of pings into the great ecosystem, but a big part of it is also that simple button marked COMMENT.

Invite feedback! Engage your customers! Let them tell you what next week's special should be or how you could improve your service or what they'd pay for whatever it is they'd want to buy.

Weblogs have many mechanisms for commentary, and some will make more sense for your business than others. For some, a simple email comment can field typical customer questions, or a comment button can let one visitor amend, extend or challenge what you write. If there are many voices with different angles on a post, you might opt for a discussion forum or even start composing a community book.

Capturing the Business Narrative

Consider our bicycle shop example and let's add a post about an upcoming cycling tour. One visitor may post a question about the slope grades or the facilities at the bed and breakfast en route, others could answer with their own experiences and now this whole conversation is not only happening in your store, but it will remain as a guide for next year's event and the year after. Using a weblog portal like Drupal, particularly helpful posts could be inserted into a community book and offered as a general guide to all tour participants.

Conversations can also happen between weblog sites. In our business of knowledge management and interaction design, our colleagues and customers often have a lot to say about what we post on our site (this post included); most will comment to their own weblogs and our site will detect these as Trackbacks listed in our sidebars and page summaries.

Will that be cash or ...

So ... why would you want a business weblog?

You have a customer in your virtual store, they are holding the goods they came in to buy, equipped with consumer education you and your customers have provided and all of it pointing to yours as the best choice (because you've listened to every complaint and resolved them completely ;) This customer knows you have the goods, they know your reputation and you've invited them to participate in the future of their shopping experience.

How could you not close the sale?

Questions or Comments? Please leave your comments on this article through the link at the bottom, or you can post your questions in our Weblog Discussion Forum.

For more information on developing your business weblog or community of interest portal, please contact teledynamics by telephone at 519-422-1150 (ET) or via email at sales@teledyn.com