Great, thanks. I’ve got your feed, so I’ll be watching, reading and commenting when I feel I can add to the conversation.

Thanks for sharing your approach and the reasoning behind it. Let us know when you make updates to your site.

Wendy,

I’m guessing you’re talking about problogging stuff. But how do you feel about bloggers who are promoting their business; trying to gently convert readers into clients? Do you give this as much credibility?

Also, I know I said that a bit rough…sorry, it’s late and words are not my friend right now.

Maverick,

Thanks for your continued comments. We’ll have to meet some time…

@Maverick – Thank you for the compliments. I appreciate the link to that blog, it will be interested as I will be going dental after MA.

I like your thinking. I’m waiting before fully expanding my blog, but it will have advertising of my services on it.

Alex,

I like the simplicity of your blog, but I wouldn’t be offended if their were offerings. I think you might like Chris Barrow’s blog http://www.thebusinesscoachingco.com/blog/

Will you be going to denistry school after your MA?

Personally, I think there are pros and cons to starting out a blog that way. You are obviously aware of the pros. Here’s some of the cons I thought of:

1 – Sometimes if I see a blog without advertising, I actually take it a little less seriously. The reason that is the case is because I know how much work a blog is, and if there is no advertising, I make the assumption that the blog is a passtime, not a business. If a blog is a business, interestingly enough, I give it a little more credibility. I think that is because then I know the author has a reputation at stake, and would likely not compromise their content for a few bucks.

2 – Once you have a following, they will be used to not having ads around. When you finally do add the advertising, some of your established readers might not like the change. I decided to have advertising from day one, because I didn’t want to grow something only to lose a percentage of it later. I figured if anyone was THAT turned off by some ads, I probably would never make any money off of them anyway. I certainly would hope they would want to read the blog, but if not, I know there are plenty of others out there who don’t get hung up on this kind of thing.

Wow, perhaps I should have put this up as a post, eh? It’s a little LONG! :/

Reason for this? My current belief is that a blog will attract more return visitors when it is advertisement free. Being a pretty new site, I am going to take advantage of this fact.

Also, being that the site and blog are a seperate entity you will notice that alexshalman.com has a better alexa score and pagerank. Someday I’ll be able to take advantage of this fact.

Interesting idea. Might work, though under something like…

A regular free teleclass where people can learn a little bit about blogging. You entice your audience to call in because their curious about how to blog. And you spend your time teaching them very basic blogging while using your blog. If you had 10 callers and got them all to begin commenting, it might make quite the impact. And, you’ve gained a bunch of blog readers in your target market.

Thanks for contacting me earlier. I will just sort of repeat what I wrote in response to your e-mail earlier and add to it a bit.

For the first couple of months I was always “advertising” and leaving comments with http://www.alexshalman.com/blog, and many people link to /blog instead of the homepage. So I get many more first time visitors to the blog than to the homepage.

When I first started the site, I decided to do a wordpress/html combination with a homepage in order to have more flexibility. I now know that the homepage serves as a great gateway to introduce people to my content. Even though most people go to .com/blog instead of .com for my site, the people that do visit through my homepage stick around and click through to other sections.

I can’t really report which method works best as I’m very actively tweaking content/layout right now. Keep checking back to see progress on the optimal layout.

You can set 2 phone appointments with people that are in your Target Market however non-bloggers each week. Make sure you share with them to have access to a computer during the call.

At the call, share with them how their voice matters and walk them through how to make a comment on one of your posts.

They will click the Notify me of followup and then Bingo – they are in the loop and potential clients have been added to your blog.

Sure. I’m really thinking about this from a small business perspective. In other words, how can small business owners, whose audience will likely be bloggers and nonbloggers alike, make it easier for the nonbloggers to get involved? You know, commenting, feed links, etc. How do we help them discover the world of blogging effectively?

On my other blogs, well that’s a very different matter, not really ‘business’ based, so not sure how and if to ‘welcome’ new readers. Like the idea of a kind of ‘instruction’ note on the sidebar, so might do that later this week just to ‘try it out’

Either of you have any ideas how to best educate new/non bloggers on how to use our blogs? Think about it from the perspective of a new visitor who doesn’t know what a blog is or that they can interact with it.

Haven’t had time to visit your site yet, sorry (too much to do toady I’m afraid).

As for your question, yes I have used Google stats (must be ‘running’ also somewhere ) but after Statcounter it was a bit of a disappointment (I’m ‘spoiled’ I think), especially on the keywords side and ‘came from’ stats so after two weeks I gave up on Google.

Recently, because our website is getting more popular (and bringing customeres to our little showroom) I enhanced my account to a paying one and I haven’t regretted it, it helps me even better to keep the sites ‘working’ in the best way possible. So for me it has become a real tool, not just an interesting thing to have

Thanks for your suggestion. I’ve used Statcounter in the past. It’s pretty nice. I like Google Analytics more because I find it much easier to read. And it’s a powerful or perhaps more than Statcounter.

David,

Yeah, I got you. I’ll write you an email about it later today. Odd, I thought you’d know that.

I look forward to it greatly.

Karin H., have you used Google stats? I’d be interested to know how stat counter compares.

Just a short comment with a tip for using Statcounter on your website and/or blog. It gives you a world of stats and shows you where you’re readers are coming from, how long they’re staying, what pages they click on etc. The ‘lite’ version is free and it comes with a invisible tracker. I’m using it now for over 3 years and it’s a ‘gold-mine’ on webmarketing trial and error
http://www.statcounter.com/

It’s interesting we’ve launched into this conversation today. I was assigned to you for a SOAPing. It looks like we’re beginning – just publicly.

I like the headlines being on your homepage. I was just suggesting they be easier to identify for your site visitors.

Recently I added the latest three blog headlines to my static homepage, courtesy of an excellent FeedBurner code that updates them automatically. Prior to that I had sometimes manually updated headlines (very time consuming in comparison).

Thanks for the conversation Dawud.