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.