My mother is an artist and the co-op gallery that she’s a member of recently held their annual holiday open house. The basic gist with an open house is: send out invites, throw open the doors, hand out cookies and wine, and watch the magic happen.

After the event my mom turned to me and asked why this wasn’t working to increase the gallery’s business. The sad truth is that open houses are always attended by friends, family and loved ones (who hopefully already know how wonderful you are). The rest of the crowd is made up of various freeloaders and weirdoes; The people in the corner on their fifth glass of cheap wine who pause only to ask you why you never thought of making more paintings about clocks.

The result of this particular open house was that- after a big expenditure of time, energy, and resources- they had exactly zero sales. Since “sales” is hardly the only indicator of success consider that, more importantly, the result was also zero meaningful conversations and zero new relationships formed.

The impulse to have an open house is a good one. I think the primary drive behind it is to increase business by connecting to your community and providing something of value to them (the aforementioned cookies and wine). The essence of marketing is connecting to your community and providing something of value to them- so where does the open house misfire? I think it happens in two key places.

The first misfire is inviting your community to come to you, instead of going out to them. We do this so often as wellness providers. We place ads, we hang flyers, we write letters to people who might be a referral source and ask if they might be interested in sending us some business. The list goes on. What if, instead, you went out them? What if you thought about things from their perspective and started considering collaborations that might benefit everyone.

This brings me to the second misfire. The thing of value that they offered: A. wasn’t that rare or valuable, and B. had nothing to do with what they were up to (that being making artwork). When you go out to your community go out there with unique ideas that benefit everyone by being relevant to everyone. You know that natural food market in your town? What if, instead of posting a flyer there among all the other flyers, you contacted the owner of the store to see if he’d run a promotion for a month: anyone who buys at least $50 worth of groceries gets half off a massage with you. Cashiers are instructed to slip the half off postcard into the bags of those who spent more than $50, and to tell them about the offer. Signs are posted at entrances and exits of the store. The owner of the store wins because he’s offering something extra of value to his customers. You win because suddenly your name is spread in a dynamic way to your target audience. The customers win because they got a great discount on something they’re interested in simply for doing what they would have normally done- their grocery shopping. There are tons of other places you could collaborate- local yoga centers, gyms, with fellow practitioners, etc. Who in your community could benefit from a great win-win opportunity?

This is a guest post from Kathleen Sullivan. I wanted to get this up here as a follow-up to my last post about free and easy website alternatives. It’s a long post, but Kathleen’s got some good food for thought here, so if you’re trying to get your site up, give it a read! And hey, there’s always Squidoo…

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FREE AND SELF-HOSTED BLOGS PLATFORMS? 

INTRODUCTION
There is a world of difference between the two blogging platforms, but there is nothing wrong with using free blogging sites. They are simple to use, they look cute, and they serve a purpose. In fact, I used to have a free blog on blogger.com and I was very happy with it because it served my purposes at the time. Besides, I didn’t know any different. I even recommended it to others and we all had a great time blogging. I think they are such a great service and I am a huge proponent of them, with one exception: businesses should not be using a free blogging platform.

WHAT ARE FREE BLOGGING SITES?
They are sites where you can create an account and become a member for free. Your blog becomes a sub domain blog, meaning that there is a main domain and you are a secondary blog on that domain. Everything you do affects (benefits) the main domain. Some examples of free blogging sites (platforms) are blogger.com and WordPress.com. They are really great because there is very little technical knowledge required in setting them up. Basically, you create an account, choose a template, and start writing. For
those of you who are looking to stay connected with family, write about your life, or connect with others around a hobby or any other non-business related activity, you cannot beat the free blogging sites.

WELL THEN, WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
Some of the less serious problems with free blogging sites are that there can be a lot of spam, and they usually offer very little bandwidth (speed at which you can move around in a site), customization, or template choice. On a more serious note, if you decide later to change to another site, you will have to
change your blog name as you cannot take a name.blogsite.com type of domain name with you. You will also lose your established traffic and people will have to find you once again.
Speaking of traffic, (which affects your ranking on the internet) all of the traffic you have generated by your hard work at blogging only benefits the host, meaning that you do not get any ranking in the search engines for this traffic you have built up. You have no control over the advertising on your free site (and there will be
advertising), and if there is any money generated by the ads, you do not get it. Finally, and probably the most serious of all: is that the blog is never really yours.

SELF-HOSTED BLOGS
As I am most familiar with the WordPress.org platform, I will use it to show the differences between free and self-hosted platforms.

HOW DOES IT BENEFIT ME TO USE A SELF-HOSTED SITE?
First and foremost, you own the blog. You can do what you wish with it, including building it into a blogging machine and selling it. Since self-hosted blogs are extremely search engine friendly, all the traffic that is
generated by your blogging and attracting visitors to your site is now yours. Your traffic helps you to get rankings in the search engines because each blog entry alerts the search engines to go to your site to “crawl it” for new content, thus building traffic due to the higher rankings, and around and around it goes.
You can look like a real pro with your own email address at your own domain name. You maintain your branding, build legitimacy, and you are taken seriously. If you choose to have Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising like Google AdWords on your site, you get to keep the money, because basically you own everything about your domain.
I think that the most beneficial aspect to a self-hosted blog platform like WordPress.org is that you can customize it and make it your “website”. That’s right-no more spending lots of money on having a website built. No more charges for updating content on your site. No more waiting to have the updates completed. You can do it all yourself!

HOW, YOU ASK?
I won’t go into a lot of details about the technical aspect of it, but you will have to trust me that you can do it if you choose to. (I am a Virtual Assistant so I must remind you to outsource, outsource, outsource the tasks you don’t want to and don’t have time to do). Basically, you activate the WordPress.org software at your host site. You peruse the WordPress site for templates and plug-ins (these make your site functional) and then upload them to your host site as well. There are 3 or 4 very important plug-ins that all
sites need. Now you are ready to go. You go to your browser and type your new address into the address bar. You will log in to your new site at the “dashboard” where all the controls are. You activate your plug-ins and widgets, create some pages, and upload any graphics, video, and content you wish to have on your site. Sort it all and arrange it how you like and you are ready to blog. The dashboard is very easy to work in so every time you want to add content, you log in there, use some drop down menus to choose what it is you want to do whether add a new page, or blog about your business, and then you do it. You can create pages such as “About Us”, “Our Products”, “Contact Us”, “Blog”, and so on, just like a traditional website. Some pages can remain static if you like and some can be changed daily. Your blog posts will always go to your blog page though. Of course this is the simple view of having a self hosted site, but it isn’t much more difficult than that. You may need some assistance figuring out how to upload to the host site, and maybe even in activating the plug-ins, but very few people would have problems writing and publishing their blog posts, and that I know for sure. Additionally, if you have purchased hosting with a really good hosting company, their support team will be willing to help you with the uploads. Note: hosting sites generally do not support the WordPress platform per se, but they will help you get your site up on the net.

DOMAIN NAMES
To get my blog up and running, I needed to purchase a domain name. This is like purchasing an address for yourself on the internet. Mine is thesavvyva.com, and while I was at it, I also bought the .net, and .org, since
they are inexpensive and are counted as assets to my business anyway. This also protects me in the future from someone else purchasing these domains to:

 try to pose as me by creating a similar business with the similar domain names
 hold them hostage for the day when I decide I need to purchase those domains as well (at an overinflated price of course)

The value of domain names is that you can choose one that is relevant to your business. For example, if you are a VA, then you want your domain name to suggest that you are a VA. Your own domain gives the look and feel of a professional, gives you legitimacy, and stays in line with your branding.

HOSTING
Once you have your domain name, you will need to do some research on the subject of hosting. Your ideal host may in fact be the same place you purchased your domain name, but not always. Not all hosts are created equal; in fact, there are huge differences between offerings by different companies. For one, since I am using WordPress.org as my example, I would want to know that they support WordPress (and
many don’t). Other examples of differences between what companies offer are:
 price
 bandwidth
 uptime
 how many domains can be pointed, parked, and hosted there (and included in
the price)

CONCLUSION
You now have a very condensed version of the difference between free and self-hosted blog platforms, and I hope it has cleared up any confusion about them. Again, I love free sites. They are fun and can be very useful for social blogging. My recommendation is that if you are in business, you really need to get onto a self hosted platform.

ABOUT KATHLEEN

Kathleen Sullivan is a Virtual Assistant and Online Business support person who officially opened her business in January of 2008 (unofficially, it has been much longer). She is enjoying the fruits of her labour today as it has been a goal for quite some to be in business for herself. She loves being in a business that she can work on from anywhere as long as she has her laptop with her. Kathleen specializes in WordPress blog design, developing E-books, setting up 1Shopping Cart and autoresponders, and likes to dabble in Social Networking. This e-book is a result of efforts to educate about self-hosted blog design. Kathleen enjoys solving problems for online businesswomen by lighting the technical path for them, so to speak. Many of the skills she has are self-taught, others were learned from contracting positions she held with the federal government in Canada, and still others are from advanced education. Her background in education and coaching (she trained as a Life Skills Coach way back in the early 1990’s), gives her inside knowledge to the motivation, passion, drive, and other traits of women entrepreneurs who are running their own businesses. She studied Textile Arts in partnership with Art History, (where she wrote papers until her head was empty), and is an award winning artist. Until recently, she was studying cultural anthropology part-time while working for the Federal Government in Canada. Always considered a very creative ‘ideas’ person, people have often relied on her for answers and direction, and she thrives on being that go-to person. If someone needs to find something, to find a way to do something, or to find an answer to something, Kathleen is the person to ask.