The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains three weblogs, The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, focused on business and industry analysis, the eponymous Ask Dave Taylor devoted to tech and business Q&A and The Attachment Parenting Blog, discussing topics of interest to parents. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

Your Daily Art: A great example of leveraging blogging

I'm always looking for small entrepreneurial businesses that demonstrate how a smart business blog can help raise your visibility in the community, gain traffic, and improve your sales. It's not always easy, between the ceaseless stream of advertising blogs (I will mercifully not link to any here) and the boring sites that aren't even of interest to target customers, to the random flow-of-consciousness sites that are 20% on topic, 80% drivel and unrelated.

That's why I was delighted when I bumped into the simple, elegant, and interesting Your Daily Art weblog. Written by Martha Cleveland, the site presents a photograph of a piece of art, adds a little background information, and does it all to drive business to her Youngest Daughter line of jewelry. Brilliant!

Here's today's entry, to whet your appetite:

Dance at the Moulin Rouge, 1890 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in the world of dance halls, becoming friends with the performers. He saw the upper class men of his birth, visit these lower class venues looking for drink and prostitutes and must of felt that at least his working friends in the venues were the more honest about who they really were.

I envision a local musical group having a similar sort of approach where they'd link to an MP3 of them playing a famous piece of music, then have commentary from the various members of the group about the composer, the challenges of playing the piece, what they visualize as they proceed through it, etc. In fact, I've already suggested just such a blog to my friends at the Boulder Chamber Orchestra.

The only wrinkle with Your Daily Art that I see is that it's not attracting just Martha's target audience of jewelry buyers. It's not exactly on focus. Remember, the smart goal for online businesses is to attract more customers not just more visitors. Nonetheless, there's a certain aesthetic shared between those who can appreciate the arts and those that would be interested in buying decorative jewelry, I think, so it's not too far off.

Just as importantly, I imagine it's darn fun to come up with the art of the day, do a bit of research into the artist and the piece, and enjoy helping people expand their horizons artistically.

Kudos to Martha for her Your Daily Art weblog.

Anyone seen any other terrific, simple examples of leveraging blogging as a traffic generator for an entrepreneurial business?

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