At the Be Your Own Boss forum, regular contributer Prompt said the following in response to the last article about writing blogs for businesses:

I think this is a great idea, and quite a viable one for me; however, how do you find these businesses who are looking for someone to run a blog for them? Any tips would be grea

His question is not necessarily unique to this business idea, but one that I seem to get all the time in real life or in e-mails: how do you find customers for a business market that is too new to be really well known?

In my experience, I always try to enter a business market before everyone knows about it. The biggest rewards come from the biggest risks. If you have experience in a market when it is still young, you’ll be at the top of the pack when the market explodes. Getting customers when the market is young requires a combination of skills as well as time to work on developing the market itself. When I enter a new market, I always work to build my portfolio of successful works in that market. In terms of blog writing, my first 3 blogs that I wrote were my own. I learned the upsides and downsides of all the various platforms, learned how to start working on interfacing and traffic building, and also learned the best ways to develop a return readership — all talents that I could not learn by going to school or buying a book. I had to try first on my own.

I did the same thing in almost every business I’ve started. When I sold skateboards and paintball markers, I didn’t really know the ins-and-outs of the devices. I had used them and had fun with them, but I didn’t know what made them tick. I bought a few dozen from anothe retail store and beat on them until I learned that I could compete in the market. When I co-founded Deep Productions, I had absolutely ZERO experience in the 3D design and layout market. I bought all the software I needed, built my own development PC network, and performed a few trial jobs to see if I could handle things. Deep also started as a webdesign outfit, Deep Interactive, and none of us had any knowledge of web design when we started the company almost 12 years ago.

Once that first step is out of the way, the next step is to take your personal portfolio and expand it to be a professional one. In some markets I had to actually do some jobs for free — pro bono, as the lawyers call it. In many cases it took me weeks to find small local businesses who would give me a job that they needed done, and I’d do it for free. Today, with the Internet, finding customers who will give you a positive reference in exchange for your work (cheaply or freely) is much easier. Don’t think that you’re actually doing work for nothing — building a portfolio of work and a profile of customers with positive references is more important than building an income early on.

For most of us, we’re lazy. We want to do something simple to attract customers, but business doesn’t work that way. Even the biggest and most famous companies in a market still have to work hard to attract new customers, especially with little ankle-biter companies like mine giving them competition. You won’t find work if you don’t build a portfolio of jobs you’ve done. Your portfolio won’t mean anything unless you have 3-5 customers who you’ve worked for who will vouch for your talent, your ability to meet deadlines and your long-term customer service. Once both the portfolio of work and the profile of clients have been built, finding new work is much easier. I’ll go into marketing to customers directly in an upcoming article.

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Life is funny quite often lately, especially given that I’ll be getting ready to write an article when my RSS reader beeps and another site I read happens to publish something on-topic with what I’m writing. Today that happens to be a regular site I like to, Darren the Pro-Blogger. He was asked by a reader about managing a blog for a business. Darren admits he has little experience in the process, as he writes for his own sites and not necessarily for the sites of others.

I have a very strong experience in blogging for others, as I maintain 6 blogs for other people’s businesses. They pay me a regular monthly contract to update their blogs and to do the hardest part of blogging: following through. If you’re a decent writer, can set aside about 8 hours a month per customer, and focus on their industry, this is a business that will blow through the roof in coming months. I’m already finding my market expanding, even though I had only planned on support 4 sites. I’m even getting calls from churches, non-for-profits and individuals who hear about me from the few customers I’m currently supporting.

Since part of my job is to hide the fact that an outsider is actually creating the site, I’m not able to provide links for the moment. In the next few months, though, I’ll be bringing on 3 new customers who said they’re OK with me providing links to the work, in exchange for a better rate. I usually don’t care about having a public portfolio, but in this case I feel it ties in well with this site.

If you want to provide a blog for local businesses, there are about 7 processes I’ve come across that are necessary:

1. How often do they want to update their blog? Less than 4 times a month makes it not worth starting. More than 12 times a month makes it not financially efficient.
2. What information do they what to cover on a regular basis? I recommend setting up the categories early on, and then covering each category in a round-robin situation until the blog is consistent and has a good archive.
3. Who will you have to contact to get information to post a new blog article? At one of my customers, I have to call 6 different managers weekly to get updates (e-mails get ignored). The more people you have to call, the higher you have to charge.
4. Who will be coming to the blog? Will it be previous customers? Will it be new customers? Will it be random people searching for that business? Will it be competitors or suppliers or wholesalers?
5. What is their main purpose in having a blog? Is it for sales reasons, or for customer service (tech issues, updates, etc), or are they just doing it for ego?
6. What is their short term and long term plan? I like contracts, usually 6 - 24 months at a minimum. If a customer can’t agree to carrying me for at least 6 months, I can’t do my job properly. I generally charge my fee over that initial 6 month period.
7. What will you have to do beyond getting text information? Will you have to take photo of jobs, will you have to do face-to-face interviews with the employee of the month, etc?

The 6 business blogs I maintain now are decent but nothing exciting. In the future I hope that I can charge upwards of US$300-500 per month to maintain each blog (which is currently below my regular hourly rate). For someone with good writing skills, a journalistic view of the world and the ability to procure information from those who have it, writing a blog for a business can be a reasonably decent income. If you invest 8 hours a month per customer and can find 20 customers to maintain, you can put yourself in the 6-figure income level fairly quickly. This is one of those businesses that either get you a lot of word-of-mouth advertising, or none because the customers don’t want anyone finding their secret source. It’s like a good plumber — no one wants to share him. I make it a part of my sales technique to demand that I get positive references in exchange for a reduced rate. When you’re new to a market or field, your portfolio is just as important as your contract — without being able to build a customer base from positive reviews of your current customers, you won’t grow and you won’t be able to sell yourself if the market is too new.

The blog market will explode in 2007, don’t miss out on it. I would not doubt that there are millions to be made within 15 minutes of my home, but I don’t have the time or the responsibility to grab all that work. Do you?

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I found a link over at Darren the ProBlogger’s site to talks about the costs of web design. After reading the comments on both sites, I realized that most wannabe entrepreneurs are absolutely clueless in money issues, and it scares me to see people trying to earn money without understanding what it is they’re trying to do.

In business, costs are irrelevant. There is no “too expensive” or “too cheap” price to a product or service, since every product and every service is unique every time it is sold or bartered for. Web design is a huge business today, but not in the number of quality designers — there are hundreds of thousands of terrible web designers trying to sell their services. Does this mean these terrible ones are too expensive, no matter what? Not at all — “too expensive” doesn’t exist.

When you are in business (or even just a consumer), you have to look at every bit of money or time spent and see if the spending is efficient in your business (or life). Will buying a certain product or service be cheaper in the long run than making it yourself? Is the product that you can make yourself going to be as good as the one you’ll hire out? Unless you’re a great graphic designer, the answer is yes — it is often times better to hire a professional than to try to attempt it yourself.

I’m amazed that someone can look at a great web design for US$3000 and think it is too expensive. A great web design involves years of experience in knowing what code works, but also requires years of experience in knowing what graphics design is useful for. Understanding fonts, placements, layouts, colors and overall look-and-feel is not something that comes naturally to 90% of people out there. They know when something looks wrong or right, but they have no idea how to change things. This is where a pro comes in.

A good entrepreneur should have no problem earning US$80-US$150 per hour on a contract basis. Can you make a great website in 20-40 hours? I doubt it (many of my friends who think they could have shown me that they couldn’t do it in 50 hours or 100 hours, too). I’m no web designer (as you can tell), but as soon as I am ready to promote my sites more, I’ll be hiring someone to create something new and interesting and unqiue — this is what a good designer does for you.

In all my businesses I’ve owned, I never cleaned my facilities myself. I hired it out. A cleaning crew could do in 2 hours (and for under US$100) what took me a week and hundreds more in cleaning products and trash collection. I hired it out because they were cheaper and more efficient than myself. I never bothered to have my own answering machine or voice mail — I hired out answering services that took great notes, prioritized my messages and even paged me in emergencies. It was cheaper and more efficient to have someone else do the work!

Don’t automatically look at certain business expenses as “too expensive” or “worthless” until you realize how much time you’re saving, how much money you might save in the long run, and how useful the item or service will be to your income. People don’t charge more than they’re worth — if they did, they’d be out of business very quickly. Don’t mock or criticize others without understanding what is involved in their work, and if paying them to do something for you saves you time and money, be happy that you found someone able to make your life easier.

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A few weeks ago I found myself sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of tea and staring out the window. At 11:30am. On a Wednesday. My energy wasn’t tapped from overworking or overpartying or over-extending myself in any way. The fact is, I was slacking because life was getting very steady and stable. I’m driven best by customers who call with last minute deadlines, emergencies and big news days — I also get to charge more for those events. When self-employment settles into a regular daily habit, it can become very easy to slack.

For most people, there is a difference between taking some time off to “veg out” and slacking. If you’ve just worked harder than ever before and if your body (and friends and family) are telling you to take a break, do it. If your responsibilities are met and you’re not under any deadline pressure, nothing is wrong with taking a day or two vacation from work just to refocus and get back to working hard and profitably. Slacking, though, comes from when you’re just doing enough to earn a check, but not really doing enough to look to the future. Looking to the future to me means marketing, thanking your past customers, and following up on leads.

For an entrepreneur, slacking is part of the business, it seems. We tend to get into a steady cycle of work and fun, and eventually we find that we can work a little less and still earn as much as usual. Becoming productive and efficient at your work will leave you with much more time than you’d get in your 9-5, when you’d slack in between visits from the boss or the managers. Instead of slacking in 5 and 10 minute breaks throughout every work day, you build it up and spend that slack time when it is least warranted: when everything seems stable and things look good for the time being.

Business is never stable, and if you don’t grow, you’ll shrink. I find myself in slack mode about once every 3 months: just as I’ve picked up new customers and finished some normal projects, I’ll find myself wandering off into lazy-land. It takes a full day or two to realize it, and that is 2 days lost to no productive results. Vacation time is good because it does produce a positive result: you get much needed downtime to refocus. Slacking doesn’t do this, it just lets you forget about today, tomorrow, yesterday and everything that needs to be done or needed to be done. It is a real destroyer of many entrepreneurs who start to slack regularly, happy that they can make in 8 hours what used to take them 40.

When the day comes where there isn’t 8 billable hours of work in a week, they’ll wonder where the work went. I’ll tell you where it goes: it slipped into the walls around you when you slacked, and you’ve lost all that time not being productive in some way.

Don’t slack.

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I tried something a little over a month ago just as a test — I had about 500% more business cards printed than I usually do. I like to carry 10 cards with me at all times (3 for my websites, and 7 for my main business). I usually give business cards out to people who are interested in my work (they’ll ask for my information). In the past 6 weeks I’ve handed out over 700 cards to family, friends and people I just randomly meet while out and about. Even when people didn’t ask me for information or even what I do for a living, I ended the conversation with a card and a one sentence rundown: “I own this business, if you need my services or know anyone who does, please consider giving me a call or passing on my name.” Most people I know already know my business, but not all my friends and family have been good referrals for work. Some probably never even mention me when problems for other arise.

In the 6 weeks that I’ve passed out, on average, 20 cards a day, the response was greater than I had expected: I received 12 phone calls and 19 e-mails from people I never met and had no connection to. They all received my card from people I mostly didn’t know: “My friend Gus gave me your card the other day when I told him I was having a problem. He thought you could help me.” I have no idea who Gus is, unfortunately, but I thank him nonetheless. Out of the 31 responses I received, I’m sure to gain at least 3 customers. If I’m lucky, responsible and productive on bringing in more customers, I might double that number. This is free business for me, I spent only a nickel or so on the advertisement, and used word of mouth as the force behind the marketing.

I keep hearing from other friends of mine on how slow business is right now. Many of them are doing nothing to change that, they’re waiting for yellow pages listing to be found, or waiting for old customer to remember their numbers. I never look at a past customer as a future customer unless I take a step to help them refind me. Even my monthly contracts are not set in stone: when they expire, I have to propose to them to bring me back. This is how life is — humans are focused on themselves, and it is very easy to forget others. We even tend to forget our own families that live with us.

I was relatively shocked that every response (but 2) came from people I don’t even know. One person I met while leaving my favorite tobacco shop gave my card to another person who gave it to the person who called me! That’s networking, even though not a single person in the chain actually knew if I was any good or if I knew what I was doing. My card worked hard for me, and so did people down the line.

The cards that failed the most were cards I gave to business clients — they already get so many cards from suppliers and customers that they tend to end up in a cardfile and become forgotten. They weren’t good marketing tools, yet. The cards I’ve given to friends and family have always brought me in a few customers over the years, but I don’t have high expectations. Once someone is familiar with you, their tendency to talk about you actually goes down. The best time to get word-of-mouth referrals is usually right after someone meets you, hires you, or has you do something “miraculous” for them. The rest of the time you’re put on the backburner of the stove that’s being tossed at the side of the road. Expect this to happen, and continue to work to get your name and card out.

Even my website cards have brought an increase of traffic, some of which have returned more than once. While I can’t verify that this is necessary the case, it is easy to see when someone finds my sites without a search engine (no referrer) and they’re local. I have to assume someone either told them about me verbally, or they gave them my card. It’s a win either way.

Don’t ignore those who you don’t know, they can be your best assets. They haven’t known you long enough to know your negative side, and they may run into someone who needs your services soon after you first met them. Ignoring these potential advocates of your business is a very unwise thing to do — whether you run a real brick and mortar business, a consulting company or a website.

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