Does Blogging Help Your Business?
Does blogging about your product help your business?
Many Second Life businesses do have blogs to help promote their products. Some are very product focused containing only posts about new products. Others are more personal with occasional mentions of their in-world happenings. Regardless of which style you choose, here are a few reasons for you to give it a try.
Benefits of a Blog
Extra visibility – It helps to have another way people can find you. Having a blog will make it easier for Google to find your items and even link to it. You never know when you’re going to catch a link from another popular site. Here’s to hoping
Gather feedback – Unless you purposely turn off comments, your website can be another way for people to share their thoughts.
Low cost – There are plenty of site like wordpress.com and blogger.com for people to start a blog for free. The only real cost is time. This is something you can choose to put in as little or as much as you want.
Public accountability – As the blog grows, hopefully, so does your desire not to disappoint your audience. It’s another method to help you stay on track.
Challenges
Hard to promote – People don’t usually like to read products blogs. It’s like going out of one’s way to watch commercials. You can’t just build it and expect people to come.
Difficult to measure impact – Some days it won’t even feel like the blog is helping at all. Hopefully, if you’re having fun writing, it won’t feel like a chore.
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Do you have a blog? Feel free to share the link and your thoughts on whether it is helping your virtual world business.
-Todd
P.S. Does anyone know how to get their blog added to worldofsl.com‘s aggregate feed?
Hi Todd,
have you tried contacting Tao Takashi? That would be my first stop :)
B
Yeah I’ve emailed both Tao Takashi’s email a couple of times and send him message in world. It’s like no one’s home. Either that or he’s ignoring me =p
Hmmmm, I’ve had the same from one or two aggregater sites I’ve contacted in the past. Not a peep out of them to even say ‘get lost’!!
Maybe you should start your own!! :)
-and if you do – count me in!
I promise I’d write lovely Blog notes if I thought someone was actually reading them :)
Tao is a RL aquaintance of mine and I offered a few times to help him with the feed. The problem is that it is not really designed to be maintained by more than one person as a very “deep” system access would be required and a whole bunch of scripts would need updating. On top of that his RL company keeps him pretty busy. So I can’t give you much hope.
However a while bunch of alternative feeds have mushroomed, mostly focusing on fashion though. My recommendation would be metavirtual.us since it is not only fashion focused and is the oldest of the alternative feeds.
Hey Todd,
great post.
I do have my blog on Tao’s syndicator but I know a lot of people have failed to get responses from him. Mine has been on there for just over a year and I know for the past 8 or 9 months he has not been responding to requests.
However, I can highly recommend a similar one: http://planet.slbazaar.net (I believe that still operates).
Thanks for the tip Peter. I’ll go check it out. Yeah, I was banging my head trying to figure out how to qualify for the planet.worldofsl.com feed. The clarification definitely help relieve a bit of that “what’s wrong with my blog” worry.
I have a blog for my business QT Clothing.
It doesn’t seem to get read all that much, but i think its still definitely worth the effort for the reasons described in this post.
One thing i have started doing is adding a link to my blog in a support notecard i include will all the items i sell. I have a ‘help and support’ link on my blog with information on how to get the best help and support if its needed.
I also thing that adding a bit of ‘added value’ to your blog other than simply posting about new releases can help too!
http://suellaember.blogspot.com
My blog is http://rhadesigns.blogspot.com/
I don’t know if it has any impact on the business within SL or not, but it is fun to put my thoughts, or sneak peeks at what is coming. It also gives folks a chance to see how things progress as I create.
Sometimes that can be an interest for folks, I myself love to see how things progress from a simple cube to whatever the end result is.
(not a lot of hits but then again, I am one of those creators that totally sucks at marketing) (3 years, and still virtually unknown heh)