Blogs For Business

My last post was about my failure to think like a businessman, putting myself into the shoes of the customer, seeing things from his perspective. Turns out I didn’t have much of a shot at his business anyway, he ended up hiring his son who is a musician and part-time webmaster. I wished him well.

Nevertheless, I did learn some important lessons about how to approach a certain kind of businessman on the idea of using social media for an online marketing strategy. Because he was a tough customer, a talker, a used-car type, and a know- it- all, there were many times when I just wanted to say, shut the hell up for a just a darn second and I’ll explain what I mean! And the nice thing about working for yourself is that I could have done just that!

But of course, I held my tongue, smiled and waited till he took a breath, before I continued my pitch. I ended up meeting with this guy several times and each time his total focus was how much it was going to cost him on an annual basis, I think he could have cared less about anything else. Bottom line, I couldn’t get through to him and we parted ways.

As an ethical businessman and blogger I then had some decisions to make. With my hook, line and sinker approach to selling people on the idea of a blog for their business I had not only gone ahead and created a blog (spending quite a few hours on it), but had also created a Twitter account that I populated with tweets, followers in his market and a custom design. In all I had invested about 10 hours of my time.  But the key element to all this was that I had registered a domain name which was the name of his business. He told me the name he wanted, said it was not available, I found it and registered it for two years, intending to transfer ownership to him when he signed up to work with me.

I have heard of unscrupulous people in this business holding domain names hostage or worse yet, domain squatting. I simply cannot understand a company not registering a simple domain and worse, letting one they had registered to expire.  I’m going to cut this short right now and close with what I ended up doing.

I immediately transfered ownership of the domain to this person, he wanted to pay me for my time and trouble but I refused any payment other than the domain registration fee I paid. I turned over the Twitter account and password and deleted the Blogger blog I had created. End of story.