You're the Boss, a new blog on The New York Times website, is setting out to be "the voice of small business."  It aims to cover small business news and issues and provide an online meeting place for business owners.  Visit the website to read entries from the experts--a professor of entrepreneurship, a real-life entrepreneur, a business reporter, and a personal finance advisor.

As a follow-up to Allen's recent run-down of our blog building experiment I wanted to drop a few quick notes about some of the specific social media tools we used, and talk a bit about some of the online networking tactics we employed. We are – as is readily apparent – novices in this field, so if this report doesn’t convince you to replicate our tactics directly, perhaps it’ll inspire you to go further with this than we have.

In any event, here’s what happened with social media and online networking…

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A good three months ago, we set off on a course to build the readership of this blog. We talked about the methods we’d use to do so, and we set ourselves some goals to let us know if we were having any luck. And because we figure some of you may be trying to do something similar with your own blogs, we nervously decided we’d do the whole thing live and without a net, in front of all of you, so you could gain wisdom from our successes and failures. Why not?, we figured. After all, if it works, we’ll look like geniuses, and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll be exactly where we started, with only a few folks reading our blog to know we didn’t do so well.

So how did we do, and what should we do from here? For those of you interested in this kind of navel-gazing, follow the link for an update…

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Note: This is a guest post from Michael Benidt and Sheryl Kay, who are business researchers and technology trainers, and the authors of HiddenBusinessTreasures.com. They’re great friends of the Hill Library, and we’re thrilled to hear their take on online networking.

When it comes to building your business almost everything you’ve been told about the Internet is wrong. Want a couple of examples? How ‘bout these two widely accepted business building strategies:

• Write a blog to grow your business

• Join LinkedIn to grow your business relationships

Writing a blog will not grow your business. And, joining LinkedIn will not grow your business relationships.

Does that mean that writing a blog and joining LinkedIn have no value? Of course not. It’s just the way they really work is not the way you’d think.

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There’s a surprise contender in the social media portion of our blog building scheme. It’s a site you may have scoffed at before. I admit to having done so myself. It’s Twitter: the site that has users create an account and then post – in 140 characters or less – the minutia of what they’re doing at that very instant.

Why do I think it has value? Well, first it makes it easy to define your audience. Other social media sites that we’ve used (Small Business Brief, I’m looking at you), feel like pushing content out into a void. Who reads it? I don’t know. Probably no one, unless you’re an entrenched user of the site and are adept at creating posts that appeal to that specific audience. (I was going to give an example of an absurdly titled post on Small Business Brief that nonetheless ranks highly, but will defer to better judgment. Suffice it to say, that most businesses don’t have the time it takes to create the site-specific presence necessary to get folks to read anything they post, no matter how absurdly titled.)

Twitter is much more personal at the outset than other social media sites. You can follow individuals, which puts their posts in your Twitter inbox. When you request to follow a person, they get notification that you’re doing so and may follow you in return. There’s a connection. Who are the leaders in your industry? Are they on Twitter? In certain industries I’d bet they are. Reach out to them, follow them, make a connection with them.

Because the things you post to Twitter are smaller and – by definition – very specific to what you’re doing, it’s easy (almost addictive) to become invested in the site. Plus, it’s fun.

Who knows if Twitter will actually work for us in our blog building mission? We’ll start off cautiously, trying to get the lay of the land. Because the site is so personal in nature, I don’t want to hard sell anything. But I’m optimistic about it. Want to join us? Follow us at http://twitter.com/jjhill_library.   

(Note: Also, Twitter can be less professional. For example, see our tweet about Hill blogger Allen, and his baby born Tuesday!)

People do business with people they like and trust.  But in a world where attention spans are short and making a great first impression is imperative, how do you build repartee’ with a new prospect or client? 

Note: This is a guest post from online marketing research expert Sam Richter, who also happens to be my former boss. Mr. Richter left the President’s office here at the Hill Library in January to focus on his new book, Take the Cold out of Cold Calling. Here’s a post from Sam’s camp on researching people online…

According to Sam Richter, author of the top-selling book Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, you start to build relationships by understanding what’s important to the other person, their likes and dislikes, and by sharing relevant stories.  The good news is with the Internet, it’s easy to find information on people you’ve never met, as long as you know where and how to look. 

In a business world where information is power (or if you’d just like to learn a little more about your neighbor), these Web sites offer insights into people, their background, and their interests.

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This is part four of our blog building series, wherein we enact various strategies to get our blog read by more people – and pass the things we’ve learned on to you.

In reading through online materials relating to increasing blog traffic, one theme in particular recurred over and over again: participate/network/comment on other blogs.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic from seomoz says this:

Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention.

Making Your Blog Content Discoverable from Vanessa Fox offers:

Join communities you’re interested in, comment on other blogs, jump into conversations and let others know your site is out there. If they’re interested in what you have to say, they’ll check out your site and link to you if it’s relevant to their readers.

The Secret to Building a Popular Blog from doshdosh notes:

…I’d just like to emphasize that the networking really starts with that first act of unconditional giving. That first sign of genuine interest in the other person or his/her work. The most effective way of networking is to offer something of real value for the intended party, without requesting something in return (at least not immediately). Let’s take comments as an example. Instead of just promoting yourself in your comment, write words which initiate a conversation between you and the blogger.

So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll try to initiate a conversation between us and a bunch of bloggers. But which ones?

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