I’ve been hard at work configuring a new website for business.  PortlandBusinessCommunity.com is an online networking sit for the Portland Metropolitan Business Owner.  The idea is to help bring small business owners in the area together online to discuss news of the day, business ideas, and local stuff.  There are tens of thousands of business owners in Portland that are online, but they don’t have a place where they can express their business thoughts without paying membership dues.

I’m a  member in the East Portland and Gresham Chamber of Commerce.  Both groups have lots of good people and I attend weekly.  Face-to-face marketing will never be totally erased from the marketing plans because we all also enjoy being around other people.  But best case scenario, I introduce myself to about 150 people (between the two organizations) per week.  There are maybe 15 or 20 new faces among in the 150.  So marketing at the chamber is more an effort of keeping my business name out there in public.

The are 1.9 million people living in Portland Metro.  I don’t know the exact number, but lets assume 1.2 million are adults.  Per the Pew Study group, 87% of American adult use the internet daily and 60% of them visit online networking sites.  That means there are over 626 thousand local American adults online that live with-in a 60 miles radius of where I live and work.  If a quarter of them own their own business and only 10% of them participate in my new business forum, then we could have over 15 thousand members.  To be a wildly successful blog site, I need only about 15% of the 15 thousand or 2250 members.

With traffic comes advertising revenue options plus internet links.  More links equals increased search engine visibility and thus more traffic to my business websites.  The big benefit to ALL the members of the PortlandBusinessCommunity.com site is they ALL receive more traffic to their business websites because we are all part of a large online community; but first I need to find the traffic.

Building traffic is a question of finding like minded people with similar goals and ambitions.  Owners of small business all are seeking more business and if they have an internet presence, they are already primed for such a community.  Add in the local nature of the communication medium and now our members are talking with other potential customers.  The last piece of the puzzle is price.

On the price equation, there are two parts; time and money.  To eliminate one side of this challenge I’ve made membership FREE.  In the end the goal is to gain traffic and establish online relationships with local business people, no sense charging admission for the privilege.  Time is one element that I can not eliminate.  Most people consider themselves to be bad at writing.  Because business blogging is primarily a writing task, it may be hard to convince many to participate.

BusinessBlogging.net exists to help people learn how to use blogging to promote their business, but time is an immovable force.  The first few articles takes between an hour and two hours to write.  Actually, that depends on the age of the writer.  People between 25 and 35 years old can write a blog article in about ten or fifteen minutes, but that is because they’ve been doing it for years already.  The trick is getting past the first few articles and finding your voice.  Once you have it in your mind how the medium works, then it is as easy to use to promote your business as talking to people at the Chamber events: actually easier!

Talking to people face-to-face is a two way conversation.  Thoughts get side tracked, conversations get interrupted, and people have their own agenda that prevents you from getting out what you want to say.  None of these distractions exist in the online world.  You can type what you want to say, put it out for others to read and comment on and volla!  You have a marketing message and a conversation.

My challenge will be convincing enough people to give the idea a try.  I know the process will work.  If you are reading this, then you know blogging works too.  Please share your comments on this topic.  What would help get people involved in writing blog articles?

Thanks,

Ed
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.

Joomla was an experiment in the Web 2.0 future.  Content management software is the wave of the future, but Joomla is a bit harder to use than I innitially expected.  All-in-all I think the application has lots of great features, but my issue was time.  I did not have enough time to dive into the program and learn by trial and error.  Because Joomla was an open source application, documentation was sparse.  The idea of being able to turn on and off articles seemed appealing, but for a personal home space, I think the blog format will work just fine.  Besides, I have four other blog sites I am writing for already, all using WordPress, so this way I can keep everything consistent.

Sorry for all the confusion and I’ll get the Yellowstone trip and my family’s recent visit to Portland online very soon.  Thank you for being understanding.

Ed Bejarana