Your business and your blog are very tightly linked together because the direction of your business is also the direction of your blog. Your blog is your main marketing channel and you’re going to use it to communicate with the people who need your help.
You need to understand your customer and solve a particular problem they have so that your business and your blog has focus and speaks loud and clear to your customer. By “solving a problem,” I do not necessarily mean “fix something that’s broken.”
For example, let’s say that you’re a woman who doesn’t go for the usual. You live a life loaded with ritual and meaning. You’re going to get married or have some kind of significant ceremony coming up soon in your life. You’re probably (but not necessarily) middle-aged and it’s not that you’re rich, but you know what value is and you invest in value on the important things in life.
Your problem is that you’re going to get married or have some kind of meaningful life ceremony and it’s vitally important to you that everything be just so. You cannot wear off-the-shelf cheap garbage on your body. You must have a unique couture garment. Something beautiful, sensuous, and made by hand with as much care as you give to the details of your own life.
You want something exceedingly special and you’re confronted with an endless array of cheap commodity clothing that is devoid of all story, all meaning. When you’re getting married, story and meaning are everything. All the aspects of a wedding are imbued with significance, and you want a garment that is imbued with meaning. You want to be able to relate the story of this special garment to your friends and family as you get ready or during the reception. You want the story of that garment to become part of your life’s story.
You don’t just want a seamstress. you want a Priestess of Cloth. You want to wear a handmade prayer.
I hope you can see how the “hard” marketing and technology of running a business online makes possible such an amazing “soft” business. Technological tools such as blogs, Etsy, and PayPal make it possible for my ex-wife to actually earn a living doing what she loves. She is my longest-running client and she’s putting everything she knows (and everything I taught her) into this endeavor.
We spent many late nights discussing how to conceive, focus, and run this “spiritual couture” business. It didn’t begin this way. It began as “just” a couture wedding dress site. Why? Money. But that’s where the lie is: if you make it about the money instead of the thing itself, you eat your own tail into oblivion. Money is just a side effect of what we do. It pays the bills but it’s not the goal. If that were true, it wouldn’t matter what we did. Go rob a bank or something.
As Hugh McLeod says, you’re in the de-commodification business. “Priestess of Cloth” is about as far from commodity as you can get, yes?
Except for the fact that these garments have prices and you can buy them or have them custom-made, Handmade Prayers isn’t a “shop,” it’s Denise’s way of seeing the entire world and expressing herself in it through fabric and ritual. It’s beautiful, sexy art you can wear. In order for that to happen, money has to change hands, but money’s not treated as the most important thing. It’s not that the money is insignificant—everything has significance for Denise, and money is no exception. Money has an honored place at the table, but it’s not sitting at the head of the table. Denise is focused on the value of the experience first.
Every garment she makes has a story (or three) behind it and she tells that story post by post on the blog in words and pictures. If the story of a garment resonates with you, you can become the next chapter in that story by taking possession of the garment. This is exactly the dynamic I spoke of in Artist Blogging 101. Denise is doing it with Handmade Prayers.
When what you provide has become commoditized, it’s hard to use a blog and social media to market the same things in the same ways as everyone else. People get focused on the marketing side of it when really they might be much better off reinventing the product itself. De-commodify the product. Denise is beginning at this point, not arriving at it. This is the benefit of working with a blog consultant when you’re starting out.
I know she would appreciate it if you paid her new site a visit and left a comment about what she’s doing and help her get Handmade Prayers off the ground in style.
I like how she considers each product she makes, each one having a story she writes about in her posts. This is an excellent way of reaching out to people who may be interested in her line of clothing.
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Very helpful post. I like what she is doing at her site. But I do have a question -why doesn't she show a picture of herself anywhere on the blog? I connect much better with people that are fully personal and one of the best ways to do that is to show me your smiling face. Why no picture?
I will get on her case about that. She had one and must have removed it.
Excellent and nice post! Thanks for this important data. I am also trying to make business blog,I have got good Idea and knowledge from here .
Excellent and nice post! Thanks for this important data. I am also trying to make business blog,I have got good Idea and knowledge from here .
I think that in order to be successful, a business blog must be run like a magazine rather than a business. The average business blog reader is 30-45 years old, is probably an entrepreneur and has graduated from college, that makes him a refined reader. I think it's very difficult to keep the attention of such an audience and that's why the best model would be that of a successful business magazine such as Fianancial Times or Capital. Coco Trianz
This is an good way of reaching out to people who may be interested in our Herve Leger Dress and Mens Moncler Jackets