Charles Jolley: Small Business Blog Interview

Another fast response from a featured website! Charles Jolley of Sproutit.com replied to me the day after his company's blog, The Big Act was featured as the Small Business Blog of the Day.

Here's the email interview:

Pajama Market: How has the blog impacted your company?

Charles Jolley: The blog is one of the most important ways we have to communicate with our customers and our market.  Peter, Chris, and I started Sproutit because we have this idea of how a small business can be run using cheap, web-based technologies to save time and make better decisions.  We know there are other people out there interested in building companies the same way.  Our blog is the primary way we can interact  with them and develop this Big Idea together.

PJ: What has the response been from your customers/clients?

CJ: Our customers love our blog.  The saddest thing about doing business on the internet is that you lose mutual trust and human relationship you could get with a physical location.  The blog is a great way to reintroduce that personal connection you can lose so easily.

PJ: What types of things about your work day inspire you to write a post on your blog?

CJ: I would say about half of our posts are the public part of an internal dialog we are having about this Big Idea behind Sproutit.  The other half are comprised of 'hard' news about Sproutit and rants and raves about the things other people we are interested in are doing also. (Like the Riya post.)

PJ: What have been the biggest surprises with your blog so far?

CJ: The way you build readership for your blog is different than I expected.  Blogs are the exact opposite of magazines and newsletter.  A newsletter should be specific enough to appeal to your audience, but broad enough to offer something for everyone.  Blogs on the other hand almost can't be too narrow.  The more specific the blog, the easier it is to grow your readership.

PJ: What blogging program do you use for the blog? Did you create this blog yourself? How do you like the program?

CJ: We use a blogging program called Typo that we modified a bit to drive our entire website.  Typo is the most user-friendly blogging system I've ever used.  We really love it.  Being an (almost entirely) Mac-based company, we also use a desktop app called MarsEdit by NewsGator to write our posts.

Tags: Sproutit | Sproutit.com | The Big Act | Charles Jolley