The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

From our own experience with a Squidoo Lens, we can agree with Seth Godin's recent advice to very small businesses, that a lens can drive traffic to your blog. Our Open Source Business Intelligence lens is #8 in Computers with an overall LensRank of #159. Our lens and blog are now on the first or second page of results from a Google search for Open Source BI or Open Source Business Intelligence. We've been as high as #2 overall. We think this is pretty amazing for an enterprise focus lens of such arcane interest competing against lenses on MySpace themes and designer laptop bags. Our OSS blog gets upwards of 300 hits per month from the lens.

So, I agree with Seth on the value of third-party, high SEO value sites like Squidoo and Flickr. I also have a great deal of respect for TypePad and Six Apart. However, I think that branding through your own domain is very important. I don't think that myDomain.typead.com or myDomain.blogspot.com is as powerful nor as useful as blog.myDomain.com. Most hosting companies, such as our own, where your current web site and email get provisioned now, likely have some open source blog engines like b2evolution and WordPress available. There are many themes under creative commons licenses or freely available for use with these blog engines. Another consideration is whether or not you, the very small are going to do what you're told and blog frequently enough not to look abandoned. After all, as the Nox say, the very young do not always do as they're told. And the very small business owner may be too busy to blog even monthly or weekly, let alone several times per day. So, first consider if blogging is right for you, or if a content management system (CMS), that allows you to easily update your web site with news about your business and articles or reports of interest to your customers, or forums that can serve as a community site for your current and potential customers may be more important for you. Both content management systems such as Joomla! and forums are as easy to update as blogs.

Blogging allows you to speak as if from a podium, add comments and you're a speaker taking questions from the audience, allow trackbacks are you've created a type of panel discussion. Wikis allow you to author or community author a book or magazine. CMS allows you to provide fresh information to your audience. Forums, where registered users can also post, allow the most free-form type of discussion. So, first decide what you need, alone or with an adviser, and then decide if you'll do as you're told.