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Ventura County Star: Business: Business blogging is blooming
That happened to Leah Peterson of Simi Valley, who posts interviews with other bloggers as a feature on her personal site.
One of the bloggers, who has a lot of traffic on his site, linked to her site and overwhelmed it with more traffic than it could handle. Peterson remedied the situation, but it was a reminder that an interesting post can change blog traffic levels.
Peterson has a background in photography, art and writing. She runs Crawberts.com, a Web development company, with her husband, Joe Crawford.
“Very rarely do I write about anything business-ey on my blog,” she said.
Even so, she said she found before long that her blog was leading to business connections that wouldn’t have formed otherwise.
“We don’t have to advertise as much,” she said. “We don’t have to go out looking for work as much. The word of mouth spreads instantly.”
The blog became a good place to contact people and network.
She recently posted a job ad on her blog looking for programmers — then took the opportunity to talk about those things they were looking for beyond what was mentioned in the ad, such as integrity, a strong work ethic and “know your stuff as well as you say you do.”
Peterson said there is a balance between being honest and creative while still being careful about what she posts. She makes sure to ask clients if they are OK with her mentioning contract work in the blog.
When she goes looking for people, Peterson said, one of the first things she does is look for a blog or personal Web site. She expects that others do the same.
“I think people want to know what the people are really like behind the business,” she said.
Nice work Leah!
