What a business owner's blog can accomplish

8 Simple Rules for Rating A Business Opportunity

Q: I've heard a lot lately about businesses that run a blog. I run a simple vitamin shop in my hometown and I already have a Web site. I'm curious - how would starting a blog help me?

A: That's a good question and one that's on the minds of many small business owners. It's great that you already have a Web site going, but that's just the beginning. As you know, your Web site exists to promote your business. Whether you sell your vitamins online or not, your Web site should be creating new customers for you.

Advertising your Web site on search engines such as Google and MSN can be effective at bringing in new traffic to your Web site, but these services can be very expensive and do nothing to encourage repeat traffic.

Once new visitors arrive at your site, it should accomplish two primary goals:

1. Hold the visitor's interest long enough to poke around.

2. Encourage visitors to come back.

A blog is a great way to accomplish both of these goals, says J.S. McDougall, author of "Start Your Own Blogging Business" (Entrepreneur Press).

No matter what your business is selling, it is inherently part of a community of people who share similar interests. In your case, your customers are interested in healthy diets and fitness. By building a blog on your Web site where visitors can find current information through health articles, industry news clips, diet recommendations, and such, you are providing a place on the Web for your most likely new customers to convene and, if your blog allows, converse. McDougall recommends that you post information that you know would grab the interest of your most loyal customers - that's the type of person you're looking to attract.

Your blog will also encourage new visitors to come back. Blogs are most effective when they are updated regularly and frequently,

McDougall says. Aim to post new information two to three times a day, if not more often. This steady stream of information will bring interested visitors back to see what's new. Your visitors will become your readers and your readers will become your customers.

For additional information, please visit www.fruition.ws

(Bruce Freeman, owner of a small business and an adjunct business professor at Kean University, is always looking for interesting success stories and lessons learned. Entrepreneurs can e-mail their ideas to bfreeman(at)proline-com.com or visit www.smallbusinessprofessor.net.)

Simple Truth About Million Dollar Business IdeasHow To Make Your Staff SELL MORE
Inventor passes on his tips

When None Is Best

How to Sell Your Book, CD, or DVD on Amazon

By: Noah Goldstein

Noticeably absent from this list is cigarettes, a product whose advertisements were banned from the airwaves by the Federal Government nearly thirty years ago. What seems most perplexing at first about the ban is that the executives of Big Tobacco enthusiastically endorsed the proposed regulation. Why would the chief officers of the tobacco industry agree not just to curb, but to completely eliminate, the promotion of their products from a medium which best facilitated efforts to gain and retain customers?

A few years earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had enacted the "fairness doctrine," which ordered radio stations and television networks that broadcasted controversial messages of public importance to also provide free air time to those with opposing views. Anti-tobacco groups capitalized on this ruling by initiating an ad campaign that provided viewers with effective counterarguments that refuted each purported benefit of cigarettes "demonstrated" in Big Tobacco's commercials. The anti-tobacco commercials' potency was further enhanced by the ads' inclusion of mnemonic links to easily recognizable characters, settings, themes, and narrations that were appearing in cigarette ads at the time. The counter-advertisements proved to be enormously successful; per capita cigarette consumption dropped almost 10 percent in the following three years, most of which has been attributed to the counter-ads (Simonich, 1991). It is not so surprising then, that the industry's leaders decided it would be more profitable to reallocate their advertising budgets to media to which the fairness doctrine did not apply, such as billboards and print ads.

In work that is not yet published, Robert Cialdini and colleagues (Cialdini, Petrova, Demaine, Barrett, Sagarin, Rhoads, & Maner, unpublished manuscript) conducted a series of studies to test the hypothesis that two-pronged counter-advertisements-those containing both counterarguments and mnemonic links to the original target ad-would be more effective in bolstering individuals' resistance to the persuasive appeals of the original ad than counter-ads with counterarguments alone. This strategy based on the implementation of these two-pronged counter-ads has been dubbed the "Poison Parasite Defense," because the effective counterarguments act as poison to the original arguments, while the parasitic mechanism ensures that the specific medium through which the original arguments are delivered will now also "host" these poisonous counterarguments, activating them each time the original ad is viewed. One example of the Poison Parasite at work in real life shows one Marlboro Man-type saying to another, "Bob, I've got emphysema." The next time individuals see a real life ad for Marlboros, they are more likely to automatically conjure up the counterargument and therefore become more resistant to the cigarette ad's message.

In one study, participants viewed a series of advertisements, one of which was for a chemical company called Zelotec. The same participants viewed an additional set of advertisements a week later, which included either a Poison Parasite ad, a "Counter-information Only" ad, or a Control ad. Specifically, Zelotec's original ad, featuring a pristine waterfall scene, asserted that the company was especially concerned for the environment. The Counter-information Only ad refuted Zelotec's with counterarguments that were superimposed onto a picture wholly different from that of the original ad's waterfalls (i.e., a photo of Zelotec's corporate headquarters). The Poison Parasite ad contained the same counterarguments, but they were superimposed onto the original Zelotec ad. Participants returned for a third and final session one week later and again viewed the original Zelotec ad among a number of other ads. The results were clear: As measured by participants' perceptions of Zelotec's honesty and their likelihood of supporting the company's planned move to the local area, those in the Poison Parasite condition were significantly less persuaded by Zelotec's advertisement than those in the Counter-information Only condition. In another study, similar results were found regarding advertisements for a political candidate.

These findings suggest that the sponsors of real-world ads would be locking themselves into a Chinese finger trap of sorts by attempting to overcome these types of counter-ads through an increase in the frequency with which their ads are run. In a world in which Goliath-sized companies have greater access to resources with which to reach their audiences, the Poison Parasite has the potential to arm the modern-day David with a powerful slingshot.

Source:

Cialdini, R.B., Petrova, P. K., Demaine, L. J., Barrett, D. W., Sagarin, B. J., Rhoads, K. L., & Maner, J. K. The poison parasite defense: a strategy for sapping a stronger opponent's persuasive strength.Unpublished manuscript.

Simonich, W. L. (1991). Government antismoking policies. New York, NY: P. Lang.
Mom dips into business worldA Look at the Numbers: How the Rich Get Richer
Online Logo Creation