Skateboard Blogging and Business – Sublimited.net

If you’re reading this then you know at least something about blogging because you’re reading one. But what do you know about using a blog as a business tool? Well, you might be surprised if I told you people are really making money off of blogs in and of themselves. For myself, I get a little revenue whenever someone clicks on one of the Google ads on this site, but I also get traffic to my web development firm and other web properties as well.

But the thing is that I never intended Don Loper to be a way for me to get business for MWI or anything else, it was actually intended to help me write down things, like a journal of sorts. But now that I’ve seen how well blogs get indexed in search engines and how much people read them I’m moving into the space of purposefully setting up blogs for business purposes. And with that introduction, I give you Sublimited.net.

Sublimited.net is a blog that acts as a companion for a chain of skateboard shops that I’m starting called Sublimited.

The purpose of the blog is two-fold. First, it’s kind of fun. Second, it’s intended to drive traffic to the online skateboard store at sublimited.com.

How can a blog drive revenue?

It’s about content, stupid.

People read content. People are influenced by the content they read. People can be influenced by content to think in certain ways, click on certain links, and make purchasing decisions. Blogs are pure content, and by the way, search engines love them.

Take this very site for example. When I wrote this post about a company that ripped me off when they “bought” my last company, I didn’t expect it to get ranked in search engines. Frankly, it didn’t even occur to me. So I was rather surprised when I heard that the principals at said company had found my blog and read what I said about them because I didn’t think my blog was being read by much of anyone.

However, as of the writing of this post, my post on the aforementioned company comes up as the 12th result for a search containing their name, and on the day I was informed that the company had found out about my blog it was showing up as the fourth or fifth result.

The lesson for me was two-fold (seems like everything around here is two-fold); first, that blogs are good tools for getting content ranked in search engines, and second, you better be careful what you say (I ended up removing the actual names of those I believe wronged me to avoid a lawsuit, since those guys seem to be rather jolly about slapping lawsuits around).

So that brings us back to Sublimited.net. I will be posting information about the skateboard industry in general on the site as well as product reviews (with links aplenty directly from those reviews to the products on my ecommerce site), information about the shop, and information about the shop skate team.

Why am I giving my secrets away you ask? Because I’m not too afraid of others duplicating what I’ll be doing. The technology isn’t too hard to implement, but content is labor intensive and requires a bit of talent and insider knowledge, and most of the corporate people I’ll be competing against won’t be able to pull it off, in my opinion.

Plus I still have some small tricks and such up my sleeve that I’m not sharing here. We’ll see what happens.