I thought today would be an appropriate time to comment on the first 100 Days.
No - not the first 100 Days of Obama and his new Administration.
ME! MY first 100 Days!
I’ve written this blog for 100 days straight, come hell or high water.
When I decided to give this blog a go, I committed to myself that I would actually post on it every day no matter what. I felt that managing the ‘care and feeding’ of my blog on a daily basis would make it a part of my life and routine. I hoped that writing every day would immerse me into my topics and the idea of writing again, since has a business owner most of my writing in recent years as been limited to product descriptions, customer correspondence, brochures and ad copy.
From a practical perspective, I was also aware that if I wanted blog visitors, I needed to post frequently enough to get their attention, and often enough that the search engines would index my pages. I’ve played in the past with blogs on free platforms like Blogspot and Wordpress, so I decided to set this blog up with my own domain using Wordpress, tag posts appropriately, set up a Feedburner account and so on.
Yet somehow I still thought I would have a couple months or so to quietly get my act together and post in sweet oblivion before Google grabbed the blog and assigned my PageRank. Color me crazy - or at least way behind the times.
I have really been struck by how many things have changed with Web 2.0. It’s one thing to read about it. It’s quite another to live it and manage and navigate a business through its evolution.
This blog may be new, but I am far from a newcomer to the Net. I created my first website fifteen years ago, in 1994, using the old Adobe Pagemill software. I happily basked in my #1 status on Yahoo for literally years - even though it took six months to even get listed.
I created another PageMill website in 1998 for our handmade soap business, but things really hadn’t changed much. When we were opening our store to the public, I made a point to publish travel directions for tourists on our website by the end of December 1999… even though we weren’t actually opening the doors of our retail shop until May of 2000. At the time it could take months before search engines would index changes to your website, and I wanted to make sure I allowed enough time.
We were quite stunned the following March when we had a parade of German tourists ringing our doorbell to buy soap because they had found driving directions to our front door on the Internet. (The American search engines didn’t index our changes until the following April.)
Fast forward a few years. Our ecommerce website is now database driven with more than 600 products and pages on the retail side. I can expect Google to update the site about every 7-9 days, and I schedule our site revisions and new product announcements accordingly. I review my ‘Google Alerts,’ visitor statistics and sales data every day, so I can SEO my site and make good decisions.
But my experience as a traditional ‘webmaster’ in no way prepared me for the speed of events I would experience with Backroads Business.
My blog posts appear on Google within fifteen minutes of being published. Companies are contacting me to purchase advertising space to reach what they call my important demographic, and Backroads Business even ranked #1 for the search term ‘Rural Business’, outranking even the Small Business Administration and The Rural Development program of the USDA.
For about four days. Then I was back on page six.
So at least the unpredictability of Google’s indexing has stayed the same.
However, if I write a blog post with ‘Social Media’ in the title, my readership will rise literally by several hundred visitors in the following 24 hours. It was actually shocking to discover that the sudden increase in readers could be tracked back to Twitter as the referrer, due to 53 Re-Tweets of my blog post URL in just a few hours.
I was probably more shocked by all the Tweets because I didn’t think the post was all that great, and I’d rather get attention for something I was proud of, than simply because I used ‘the right words’ in the title. I guess I’ll have to take solace in the fact that I helped 53 people trying to contribute value to the Twitter community by posting useful links.
At least the experience prompted me to download Tweetdeck and set up a Monitter account to track my business names and post titles.
Immersing myself for these 100 days in Web 2.0 for things other than my basic business has sensitized me to vast new opportunities available through the current technologies, software, apps and networking choices which for even a knowledgeable web user is challenging, to say the least. I hope I can keep up with many things I am discovering about the ‘new’ web and myself.
All in all, I’m really having a lot of fun. And I’ve got a lot of new things to learn.
So - what do you want to read about - and talk about - over the NEXT 100 days?
Local ‘mom and pop’ businesses who are effectively using Twitter and other social media were singled out recently by blogger Grace Boyle on her blog, ‘Small Hands Big Ideas‘:
Collaborative Marketing on a seasonal basis can bring success to all rural businesses involved. 
An estimated 25 million people in the United States call themselves ‘self employed.’
The struggling economy seems to be having a positive impact on agri-tourism and other rural businesses, as vacationers choose to vacation closer to home. In fact, agricultural tourism is emerging as one of the few success stories despite today’s economic challenges.
