When I began blogging at the end of November, I asked a few questions about whether all the blogging evangelicals were right, and blogging really is good for business. I asked the following questions:
- Would I be able to keep up with the demands of blogging?
- Would I find that results from my site will have improved?
- Is blogging in Israel as effective as in other parts of the world?
Here’s what I’ve found in the almost three months that I’ve been blogging:
- I started off blogging much more frequently than I do now, but that is not because my motivation levels have dropped. The reason is that I have recently had a baby, plus my workload is heavier than ever. However, it seems that my initial momentum has helped sustain the number of visits to my site and blog even during these “lean” blogging times. I have read in a number of places that the minimum blog posts per week necessary to keep up a blog is 2-3, which is pretty doable.
- I compared my site stats from a date range of 30 days from before I began blogging, to a 30 day range once my blog had been up for two months. The number of unique visitors to my site tripled! In addition, the number of visitors to our site referred from organic search now outdoes those from our CPC campaign. As a result, we have refined our CPC campaign and are now getting a better ROI.
- The Israeli business blogosphere is not really well-developed, as far as I can see. Everyone and their uncle blogs about the political situation, but business is apparently a lot less sexy. But recently I discovered the Israeli VC blogs. I don’t know if most of them were there and I just hadn’t found them, but one of them launched recently and is really great: Blogiza. Their main writer is Shai Tsur, and he has a great blogging style, and the content is really interesting. Another good business blog by someone in the VC world is Six Kids and a Full Time Job. However, the whole linking/networking aspect of blogging, which is really what it’s all about, is very weak here. Blogs don’t link or refer to each other very much.
Blogging Successes
Now on to the fun stuff: cool people we’ve connected with and exposure we’ve gotten thanks to our blog:
- I won a prize in a blogging contest.
- Seth Godin referred to me in his blog! Ok, he didn’t link to my blog or mention my last name, but I know that it’s me he’s talking about. I wrote to him about this post, and he wrote back explaining why he said what he did. But apparently my question got him thinking, and as a result he wrote this post, in which I get a mention. Yay!
- After I gave birth to said baby, I began to write about the challenges that face women business owners with regards to maternity leave. Bill Dueease, a business coach in Florida, found my articles and left a few comments. He said that my articles have inspired him to “to create a special area on my web site for mothers who wish to work, whether owning their own business or getting a job.” There is a serious shortage of information out there for business owners who have babies and how to prepare their business and themselves for it. I am excited that I will have had some part in Bill’s new effort to help others.
- One of the things I love about WordPress is the user community. WordPress is such an amazing application because there are thousands of people out there providing tips, tutorials, and creating themes and plugins. I came across a pretty handy looking plugin at Dagon Design, but it was designed for categories and I thought it would be useful if it applied to the blogroll too. I posted a comment saying so, and within two days the plugin creator wrote to tell me that he had implemented my idea! What a cool guy!
- I signed up for a Google Alert for the words “business Israel” which usually has up to ten links to articles and blogs. Well, guess who appeared in the blog section in the last alert I received? illuminea blog!
So there you go folks, our first blogging report.
To sum up: if you do it right, blogging is fun and effective.