Interview with Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting

If you do a search on Google for 'professional blogging', the number one spot is held by Tris Hussey's Larix Consulting blog 'View from the Isle'. Tris kindly agreed to be interviewed by telephone and here are some extracts from a much longer interview.

JH        What's the purpose of the blog and what are you trying to achieve?

TH       Well, my personal blog is still an outlet for writing and giving my opinion. I think most bloggers are writing because we want to be heard and that's very much true for my blog. The other thing which is important is it's an example of my writing I can show potential clients. So my blog is somewhere where people can learn about me and I can use as a stepping stone to have a larger client base and earn money.

JH        How many visitors would you get on a normal day? How does it average out?

TH       It's averaging out now over a thousand visitors a day.

JH        How effective your blog has been in generating business for your consultancy?

TH       That's interesting. That's harder for me to measure though I would say that my blog is what people who want me to write for them go to see how I write. No-one has yet come to my blog, sent me an e-mail and said, "Hey, I need you to come write for my site." It's been through other connections. Like Jeremy Wright of Inside Blogging who I write for. I found out he read my blog, he found it through a PubSub feed or something like that. He started reading my blog and when the Inside Blogging staff blogger job came up, because he was reading my blog and because he knew how I was writing and my style.

JH        I'm interested in your blogging voice. How would you describe your own personal style of blogging?

TH       It's sort of an informal conversation. That's the way I try to write most of my posts. It's taken a while to get my voice. My first posts are very stilted, "Here's a link to something I think is interesting." No real commentary, no depth or anything. And now I try to have a conversation. I'm addressing my audience and that's my voice. Of course, as a professional I also have to be able to change voice and that's something I also do. Even on my own blog, if I'm writing a serious review, "I've tried this piece of software" or whatever, I'm going to have a slightly different voice. It's still going to be somewhat conversational but it's going to be a little more formal, a little more professional but my voice is almost like you're talking to me now, just written.

JH        As a consultant your job is to advise small businesses. What for you makes a successful small business blog? What ingredients are necessary to make that blog a success?

TH       There's really two and it's nothing to do with the blogging platform and it's nothing to do with the design. It has to do with writing honestly, openly and transparently and writing with some regularity. Those are the two keys. There's nothing worse than someone starting off a really interesting blog about their small business, posting a few good posts over a couple of weeks and then they stop. Because they've lost their opportunity, they lose their audience almost instantly. I don't go blog to blog to blog to read them. I read them in my RSS aggregator so if you don't ping up, if you don't post any more, I won't read you any more. So those are the two key ingredients. Having a good honest, open, transparent voice. You've got to tell it like it is and you've got to do it regularly, at least a couple of times a week.

JH        But do you think that anyone can do it?

TH       Oh yeah, I think that anyone can do it. Small business people are always really busy and don't feel they have the time, so one of the services I provide, besides the whole blog set up and such, is that writing service where I can say, "Pay me this amount of money and I will post three to five times a week or whatever on your blog and on topics related to your business generally that will help build your traffic."

JH        Do you see any other benefits or advantages of blogs as a marketing medium?

TH       I do. In two ways. First, it does start that conversation/dialogue with your customers or potential customers and the other thing is the purely marketing search engine aspect blogs that you just can't overlook. I think one of the greatest benefits to blogs at this point is that they have such power on search engines that if you are trying to make that connection and find more customers, you have that ability to attract more people through search engines. You can't downplay that, it's so important.

JH        In my experience, it's very difficult to find small companies who are blogging. It's always the same few that seem to get mentioned again and again. There's The Tinbasher, Stonyfield Yogurt. That suggests that there's only a limited number actually who are doing it.

TH       That's true. I think part of it is that small business people are extremely busy and they don't have a lot of time to think about it. Blogs are also relatively new so that they might not be aware of the opportunity and that's where groups like the Professional Bloggers Association and Word of Mouth Marketing Association can help break more things in the mainstream. Think about where we were a year ago with blogs. I mean a year ago I wasn't even blogging and now I have a reasonably successful blog less than a year later so the whole landscape has exploded and changed. 2005 is just starting so by the end of 2005 who knows how many small businesses are going to be blogging.

JH        Do you think it's going to become a mainstream part of the marketing panoply?

TH       Yes, I think that slowly and surely it's becoming part of your web presence and people are even going to stop thinking of it as a blog. They'll call it something else. It's going to come, it's just going to take time because it's tremendously new and I think small businesses are really just getting a handle on using the Internet at all and having a website.

JH        What about the downsides? Do you see any disadvantages or risks in blogging from the point of view of a small company?

TH       Sure, from a small company point of view one downside is you have another thing you have to make sure you keep up and maintain. It's not like a static website. It's a living, breathing thing. You have to keep working at it and that's downside because it's going to take time.