Working From The Basement

When Diana and I started this blog it was pretty much for shits and giggles, well almost.  After attending Podcamp in Boston this year we wanted to try publishing content centered on small and micro-businesses.  Initially promoting the site just using the Social Media skills we had acquired in the past year also seemed like a good idea.  Since I already had this domain name registered it was just a matter of installing WordPress on one of my servers and setting up email.   If you ask me I don’t even remember registering this domain name, but the name fit and we where off to the races.

Our goal was to create a collaborative site; the reason for this is that both of us had gone very spotty on our independent blogs.  Writing one or two posts a week isn’t as hard as writing the three or four a week which is what I believe is the minimum you need for an independent blog site.  Still with our busy schedules it is still fairly difficult to maintain the pace, but we did it.  This will be our twentieth post in a month’s time which is right in line with what we wanted.

A funny thing happened though – I don’t think Diana and I have written very many articles from our original lists.  This is because we picked a really broad subject area to write about based on our everyday experiences and interactions from which we get fresh ideas. A lot of these ideas come from the comments left by our readers; these outnumber the articles 3 to 1, when you consider all the Social Media postings. The feedback we get when we attend networking events has also helped drive and motivate us like we never imagined.  So what started as a cathartic release on the joys and frustrations of the small business owner has became something bigger.

I included a chart at the beginning of the article to depict our traffic patterns using WordPress statistics which show some predicable results.  When we tweet and link the articles on Facebook, traffic is double or triple what it is if we don’t do anything.  Our rise in Google rankings is also helped by our frequent updates and posts linking us to other sites.  So anyone thinking of a way to drive traffic to their blog or website needs to post frequently and share the information using Social Media techniques.  Diana’s articles also usually rank higher than mine when we measure direct links back to the posts. This may be because I tend to promote Diana’s posts more than mine or she is just more popular, either way it is an interesting phenomenon.

We intend to expand the blog over the next few months to include podcasts and video to keep it fresh and interesting.  We really appreciate everyone’s feedback and comments both good and bad, and if you want to contribute please let us know.  We are particularly interested in expanding WFTB beyond Connecticut so if anyone is interested in covering events in different States please contact us.  Thanks again everyone for a great first month and for reading what Diana and I quietly refer to as the Seinfeld of blogs (it’s about nothing and everything, but it’s always entertaining).

WFTB – Michael Lawson, Diana Bartolotta