A Blog is a Great Way to Talk to Your Customers

Did you know that 77% of all Internet users read blogs? Well, they do.

As posted on Brandtracks (emphases from Stylo):

Take a look at these stats as of March 2008:

• There were 184 million blogs worldwide
• In the US alone, there were 77.7 million unique hits compared to 41 million visitors for Facebook and 75.1 million to MySpace
• 77% of all Internet users read blogs
• Over half of all businesses in North America don’t have a blog. That means that just under half of all businesses do. If you don’t, guess who’s talking to your customers?
• Blogs offer a channel for you to provide an instant voice to the conversation. While a personal blog can share the latest pictures of a newborn baby instantly to friends and family all over the world, a business blog works on the same premise.
• 46% of all bloggers are professionals. They are writing a corporate blog or about their industry or offering opinions about products, even the ones you sell. This equates to just over 84.5 million bloggers that are business bloggers. That’s 84.5 million businesses talking to your customers.
• Online sales in 2007 totaled $260 billion. Blogs are known to increase awareness of new products and services. That means 1 out of 2 companies are losing a large part of $260 billion dollars of online income.

Blogging is a great way to reach your audience. Stylo Creative Communications writes for blogs. We match writers experienced a specific industry with clients in that industry looking for writers! It’s a win-win.

Weekends? What are they, anyway?

I haven’t had a real “weekend” in over a month. As a business owner, I usually end up doing something work-related at some point during the weekend. But the last three weekends were beyond the norm. The first of these was spent entirely on addressing the copyeditor’s changes to my manuscript, and to organizing and labeling the over 40 diagrams and image files I have put in the book. The very next weekend was devoted to prepping for a major project for an exciting new client: Doing PR writing for a surgical CME meeting that would be taking place the following Thursday, through the weekend…my third weekend consumed with work.

That’s okay. I am happy to have begun work with such a great new client; I enjoyed the project. It is nice to have finished all this work right before Thanksgiving.

First Solo Title

I was approached by Entrepreneur Press in January, 2008 to write one of the books in their ClickStart series: Design and Launch an Online Networking Business in a Week.

My assignment, should I choose to accept it, was to create, In a well-organized and easy-to-follow format, a book that would detail everything an entrepreneur would need to get an online networking business (think of a LinkedIn, Facebook, Ecademy, Fast Pitch, Ryze, and other similar sites, but with more of a “niche” target audience) ready to go in the course of a single week. The book’s purpose was to be a primer on the revenue opportunities of social and business networking sites, written on the assumption that the reader would use a hosted, software-as-a-service provider (as opposed to licensing or creating social network software), in order to have the site up and running by the end of a single week.

I accepted the assignment. The book is written, and will come out early next year.

This book is for the person who is very interested in starting and running a business – particularly an online business – but does not have a clear idea of how to start, and doesn’t have much time – or doesn’t want to take the time – to set it up.

The reader may be ready to start, but wants a lot of the ‘research’ done for him in advance. The target reader of this book will want a concise, quick step-by-step guide to lead right up to a successful launch.

This book will cater to the entrepreneur who is not backed by a large amount of capital – and who doesn’t necessarily possess the highest level of technical expertise.

More on this later….

Feeling like a pioneer – or at least in the second wave

The initial excitement/buzz/opportunity of the Internet is making way for Web 2.0 – new platforms, user-friendly interfaces, and completely new ways to market. Traditional “web forums” and “message boards” have given evolved into MySpace, Facebook,  LinkedIn, even Twitter!! and countless other online communities, and with this evolution, a new way to generate revenue has transformed yet again the way people are using the internet to follow their entrepreneurial dreams.