If you search Google for any topic, you’ll find people calling themselves experts. From marketing experts to parenting experts to weight loss experts, they’re everywhere. Pick an area of interest and I’m sure you’ll find people calling themselves experts.

But how do they know they’re experts?

Is it based on how long they’ve been doing something? If so, I’ve been building websites for almost a decade, does that qualify me as an expert?

Or maybe I’m an expert at working with small businesses to plan, develop, and execute strategies to grow their businesses through their web presence (which is what I do today, by the way). Think about it, a web designer that understands business development, target marketing, and results-based web strategy. Very rare. But am I an expert?

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Of anyone, I know that building a small, service-oriented business is hard work. I’ve had three businesses, including two very different approaches to web development, in the past nine years. All three have been service focused. Each has been successful. And all have required quite a bit of effort to plan, build and grow.

Of course, currently, I help small and independent professional businesses plan, develop, build and grow their business through the internet. I help my clients refocus their business objectives and marketing strategies to incorporate the web. Ideally, their websites and blogs become a hub for meeting and converting their target audience.

But here, many make a critical mistake. They think of their target audience (or target market) simply as a name for the group of people they’re trying to serve. In other words, they think of target audience as being a noun. If you remember your Schoolhouse Rock, “is a person, place or thing.” It simply names.

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The other day I made this comment on Mike Sansone’s post My Struggle With Web Developers.

…I face the same uphill battle but from a different group…so called marketing coaches. Three of my four top referring sources think negatively about blogging. They see it as personal journals about useless stuff. I have a heck of a time convincing referred clients about the benefits of blogging. But the tide is turning. I have enough knowledge now and hard data to show the huge benefits that blogging can bring to business. It’s an uphill battle, for sure. Luckily I’m more interested in helping my clients build their businesses than I am sticking to some marketing coaches program.

Now I don’t want to bad mouth marketing coaches/consultants/gurus. In fact, there are many good ones who are blogging. And there are many really good marketing gurus who don’t get this blogging thing.

Many marketing gurus know that to have a successful businesses you must build a relationship with your target audience. They often suggest using carefully crafted website and newsletter content, free giveaways and teleclasses to build interest, low-level loyalty and trust. This works, I’ve done it. It’s just that there’s so much more.

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I pose this question to every client I work with. Then I have them answer it. Most answers cover branding, marketing message, or conversion. Sometimes clients will tell me that their missions statement or tagline are the most important keys to their business success. All these are good answers. None of them are wrong.

Yet most of my clients miss the most obvious, fundamental answer. The one thing that is the foundation to successfully creating a brand, converting prospects and writing a tagline.

Setting Clear, Obtainable Goals, what I call What and How.

Ah, you say. Now it makes sense. Of course, you have to know what you’re trying to accomplish before attempting to accomplish it.

I liken goal setting to traveling a long distance by car. For instance, let’s say I have a meeting with Steve Jobs at Apple. I live near Ann Arbor, Michigan and Apple’s located in Cupertino, California. I have time before my meeting next week, so I decide to drive my car across the country to the meeting – this is my what. As you can see form the map, Cupertino and Apple’s Headquarters is a long way from Ann Arbor – about 2400 miles (~ 3800 km).

Since I know my destination, I can begin planning my route. I see that when leaving my house I need to get on I-94 west and follow that expressway until it merges with I-80 West. I-80 will lead me all the way to California. Then I take a series of other highways and streets until I arrive at Apple’s Headquarters. This is the how.
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Have you seen the new tagging meme going around the blogosphere? Valeria Maltoni and Chris Cree have. They tagged Mike Sansone at Converstations who tagged me. The theme of the meme (sorry, couldn’t resist) – Why Do I Blog?

Yeah, I know, I said I wasn’t interested in memes any longer. Yet tagging memes seems so much more sensible than what happened with the 2000 Blogger meme. Here, I get to share a few of my favorite bloggers and make them known to others. A win-win in all directions.

So why do I blog? Are you sure I have to keep it to five? Okay, here it goes…

1. Connecting – I really enjoy connecting with people. Whether clients, readers or other bloggers, I’ve found no more effective way to connect with people on the web than through my blog.
2. Sharing – Giving and sharing are central aspects of who I am – both as a person and as a business owner. Blogging gives me the chance to share what I know through a medium that can help the most people.
3. Cultivate – I usually have far more ideas than I can even begin to create. Blogging, however, has helped me sew more of those ideas into the soil by giving me an overall focus for my own business development.
4. Copywriting – Writing daily has helped me organize my many ideas into bite-sized pieces that I can develop and share. Often, I write about one little piece of an overall idea I’m developing for my business or my clients.
5. Potential – I’ve found no other medium on the web to reach my potential market like I have through blogging. With the blogosphere ever-expanding and blogging becoming more mainstream, I see its almost limitless potential for business growth – mine and my clients.
6. Enjoyment – I really enjoy the whole experience of blogging. Even with the vast potential, if I wasn’t enjoying it, I couldn’t sustain it. Sure, some days it can be challenging to find what ‘feels right’ to write about, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the challenge.
7. …Okay, I’ll stop now…

Sorry, I couldn’t stop with five. I had to add sharing in there. It’s one of the important reasons I blog. So let me share with you five blogs that I really enjoy from five bloggers I’ve met blogging:

• Dave Schoof
• Gary Conn
• David Airey
• Jens P. Berget
• Doug Karr

And oh, dear reader, I hope you don’t think I forgot you. I’d love to hear why you’re blogging. So please, share with me your reasons in the comments. And remember, you’re certainly welcome to trackback.

Yesterday I wrote about my experience with the 2000 Bloggers meme, in which I cited Tony Hung’s ‘2000 Bloggers’ is Over – An Exercise in Link ‘Building’ At Its Most Useless and Pathetic. My post and some great comments have created quite a buzz.
Now I don’t think that 2000 Bloggers, or any meme is pathetic, or even useless. But I do agree with some of Tony’s points. What I question is the point of using memes to inflate my Technorati ranking. I simplly don’t know what the point is.
If you read what Doug Karr wrote in 2000 Bloggers Gaming Technorati? Waaaaah!, you’ll see he’s not apologizing for how memes are helping grow his blog. He says memes are…

…absolutely no different from sharing your blogroll, trading links with someone, giving away merchandise for mentioning your blog, linkbaiting, “Make me a Technorati Favorite” button, ‘optimizing’ for search engines, Digging, …. or even BUYING your Technorati rank by advertising on other sites. John Chow, for example, continues to utilize any and all methods to give his rank a boost.
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A few weeks back I got into ‘the 2000 Bloggers.’ It sounded like a really neat idea to build some links and gain some traffic to my blog. And it worked, at least to some degree. Looking at my site stats in Google Analytics, it appears I have gained some traffic from the 2000 Bloggers.

But the place that it made the most impact was on my Technorati ranking. Every day I watched my ranking in Technorati change; and change a lot. Some days I’d jump 30,000 positions. It was amazing. And for a few weeks, I was quite excited. As of today, my ranking is somewhere around 26,000 – a long way from where I began four short weeks ago at 1,618,000.

At first, I didn’t put together that my jump in rankings had anything to do with the 2000 Bloggers. Every day I was writing posts and commenting on a number of other blogs. I figured my ranking was due to my efforts. Until one day early last week I looked more closely at who was linking to me. To my surprise, the great majority, more than 75%, were from the 2000 Bloggers.
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Last week Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips announced ran his first, of what he’s calling his Monthly Blog Projects. He set two parameters for each month’s project:

1. Send me your tip about the current topic (the first one will be “Traffic Generation Tips”). You can use the contact form or post a comment below.
2. After I publish the list of participants and their tips you write a post with a link to everyone that participated in the project.

I thought this sounded great. All of us that read in Daily Blog Tips would benefit from all the responses Daniel get to each month’s project. AND, if we participate in the montly project, we benefit with links and trackbacks to our sites. Sounds like a win all the way around, huh?

Well Daniel just posted Blog Project: 30 Traffic Generating Tips with some nice tips from bloggers about how to grow the traffic on our blogs. Many of the tips we’ve heard before…commenting on other blogs, join communities, post frequency, etc.
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All right, the cat’s out of the bag. I am much more than just a website designer.

Healthy WebDesign is all about helping small business owners use the web to plan, develop, execute and grow their business. So yeah, I design the website. But I also help my clients get clear in their objectives and their target market. I help them position themselves in their niche and then show them how to use their websites to find clients and grow their business. That’s what this blog is all about (or at least that what it’s developing into).

Every client I have will eventually ask me if they should have a blog. My answer is always the same – “yes!” Then we talk about how blogging fits into their overall business plan. Some go forward and begin blogging. Other’s don’t.Personally, however, I think every small business and independent service professional should be blogging. They should be blogging with a clear purpose and specific goals in mind. They should take a little time to learn their way around the blogosphere. They should comment on other blogs and learn about feeds and feed readers. And they should learn how to use their blogs to network with other bloggers.

But the most important reason small business owners should be blogging is to help them refine how they write and speak about their business to their audience.
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It’s so nice to see that the blogosphere has room to stretch. Especially with A-Listers like Robert Scoble.

On Sunday, Scoble began by Pissing off the Blogosphere with his rant about bloggers not linking to other bloggers and linking to sources like the New York Times instead. That created a bit of backlash. Just read some of the comments.

A little while later he posted, Do A-List Bloggers Have a Responsibility to Link to Others, with a little help from Sue Pollinsky’s question, Do big(ger) bloggers have an obligation to smaller or newer ones to link to them? Which lead to Scoble saying:

I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but, yes, I try to link out to as many people as possible. I got found because other people linked to me, and I view it as my responsibility to link to other people as well. I also leave my comments open so people can post their own opinions and links to things.
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