Tuesday April 1 8:39 AM
There's a new theory going around board rooms that letting people into the daily business of running your business is actually good for business. CEOs are writing blogs about what they're really up to, and hoping that it will increase their bottom line. In that vein, I offer you the 3232 Design Blog, where you can find out all sorts of things about how I run my graphic design business. The idea is that in being honest with people (or at least the appearance of honesty) you can engender trust and understanding. You can let people in on secrets, or tip your hand to future trends. For me, it's all about educating passersby on what goes into really good design and how to avoid common design mistakes.

There are other good reasons to blog on your website; if your blog is set up right, Google will index it for searches. You can bring tons of traffic to your site when somebody searches for "zombie monkeys" and you happen to have written about that very topic. You never know who a potential customer might be. Another reason is that if you have something interesting and relevant to say, you may become a local authority on your blog's topic. Finally, if your blog allows comments it's another good way of interacting with the people surfing by on the internet, and finding out what they think about what you think. If people find you to be open and accessible they may remember you first when they need the product or services you offer.

There are a few guidelines for blog success: first, don't blog about your personal life or off-topic rants too much. It might be interesting to you, but if your readers are looking for web design tips then what you ate for breakfast and how you feel about it now are not really relevant.

Also, try to keep your blog narrowly focused. You are probably more of an expert in what you do than the average net user, and the more narrowly you define your topics the better chance you have at capturing a niche and steady readers.

Finally, you must be able to write. I'm sure all those big-wig CEOs have an army of zombie monkeys to write their blogs for them, but the rest of us are not so lucky. If you are a little rusty, try keeping an offline journal before publishing online. The more you write, the more your writing will improve. And mind your spellchecker.

We'll see how my experiment in Radical Transparency goes. As of this writing it's a dismal failure, but then this is only my first post -- yet I'm looking forward to seeing hordes of zombie monkey salesmen pop by looking for web design tips.