Biz Blogs: Feed the hunger for the uncertain

Shawn Chambers is a passionate plastics blogger having great success, and fun, blogging. Here is his 7 week blogging report. This dude is inspiring!

I'm about to hit 3,000 visitors able to draw from a pool of over 100 blog articles - and all in only 7 weeks.

For a newbie at all this I'm pretty thrilled with the results, especially with such a narrow scope of content - plastic sheet, rod, & tube. There's no question that our website refers a handful of people to the blog and that there is a lot of random stumblings - but facts are facts, I've impressed our brand onto a reader 3,000 times. With enough content for even a seasoned industry veteran to keep busy with, I'm in a unique position to experiment with fishing lures I might not have otherwise tried out. 

Using the analytics which tell me where people are coming from and what keywords they're using to find me, I'm now broadening the scope of my content focusing on the popular words and phrases that may not have necessarily been my first choice -- sometimes it's just cool to see just how many fish you can land on your boat (kind of like a catch-and-release sport).

Now, I'm not splogging - I'm still focusing on the general concept of plastic but I've expanded the applications beyond our core competence to research & development and industry news. The plastics industry has had a bit of a shakeup recently that I would liken to Toyota buying Ford - a giant offshore company buying a domestic champ.

Continuing the metaphor -- all the local Ford dealers are now wondering how stable their futures are going to be & how the public will respond to their brand from hereon in; and all competitors to Ford are wondering how the shakeup and disruption of service will pay off for them.  Using the strategy of feeding the hunger for the unknown I started feeding the blog opinions from banks, stock markets, pundits, and news services about the parent company, in this case, a Saudi firm, that is still a mystery to a lot of people, especially their new employees. Wow! I had significant traffic before 7am this morning! I added a few more articles today and my average daily traffic has doubled... maybe even tripled by end of day. And, from the analytics it appears readers are emailing links to others who come in by way of email.

Am I manipulating the situation for the benefit of traffic or am I offering a valuable service - they wouldn't stumble on our blog if they weren't out hunting for the information it contains, right?

Business blogging is an art and not a science. I now realize that you have to perfect catching sardines before you have the confidence, tools, and wherewithal to find and land the whale.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking by it.
Blog on!

(PS - I'm taking odds now on how long it will take someone to misquote this article as the source that spilled the beans on Toyota buying Ford!)