Thoughts on Blogging in the Early Days

I have been blogging for about a month and the experience has been better than expected.

1. Two clients have decided to start blogs as a result of seeing my blog. They plan to use the blog as a complement to their existing strategy for new business development. I also pointed out that it may be helpful to their future capital raising activities because it will help to document for potential investors how they think about their business and their approach to customers.
2. I was invited out to lunch today by one of the top marketing directors in South Florida. She wanted to discuss how her professional services firm could use blogs as a part of their marketing and customer acquisition strategy. Of course I brought up the idea of branded widgets (first posted here) and also talked about the idea of putting chat on the website so visitors could talk to a firm representative immediately. I also suggested to her the delicious link in the sidebar on the right of this blog. It gives you access to all the pages on the web that I have bookmarked and under "blog" there are some really helpful websites and blog posts on blogging. (I researched blogging for about a year before I started.)
3. The response rate to email notices about the blog is 5% of recipients are becoming subscribers. Given that the sample size is statistically significant, I am surprised that the response rate was not closer to direct marketing at about 2%.
4. I added a search widget to the sidebar and all my content on the web (this blog, my delicious bookmarks and my LinkedIn profile and "expert" answers on LinkedIn can be searched). The widget is provided by Lijit and I founded it through a post on Feld Thoughts.  When I contacted Lijit with a technical problem I got a response back in less than five minutes, which really impressed me.
5. Automatically pinging Technorati, the blog search engine, does not work very well  so I manually ping Technorati. From the FAQ  site at Technorati it looks like alot of people have the same problem. I have found that the Technorati search engine works best on proper names, so it is easy to find my post on Banyan Mezzanine but more difficult to find posts without proper names. (Maybe I should put the word "Beyonce" in every post :).

My goal for the blog is to get 1000 subscribers within a year. Now if I could just get every subscriber to this blog to tell ten of their friends about the blog and they told ten friends.........and the 5% sign up rate continues--well you know the rest.