This post is a personal story of a friends small, family-owned business seeing impressively quick benefits from their new blog site.
Last year I re-connected with a best friend from high school.  She runs the family business now – Broken Arrow Lodge & Marina – on the Fishingest Side of Lake Livingston, Texas.  I have fond memories of summer-time there.
The business did have a single static web page hosted under a local attraction directory website, and a yahoo email address, and that was about it.  For New Years this year I decided to secure a domain and set up a small blog for my friends family-owned business.
Since I’m more familiar with Wordpress, that’s what I used for this small business blog. I found a Wordpress theme, modified it to suit, and installed some favorite software, plug-ins and widgets.  I added the text and image content from the old single web page, did a little SEO to boost search traffic, and on January 1, 2010 I launched the Broken Arrow Lodge and Marina blog.
With the appropriate xml sitemaps and RSS feeds submitted to Google, Yahoo and Bing, I sat back to watch and wait for the Search Engines to crawl the new blog pages. I knew that a new blog is often crawled fairly quickly by the search bots, and I expected some relatively prompt results, but…
On January, 27, 2010 – just 26 days from the launch of the new blog site – I received the following in an email from my friend, the owner of Broken Arrow Lodge:
“Donna You did me so good! I’m very proud.”
“Things are crazy around here. We have so much better business now.It must be the web page. “
Is it the web page? Perhaps not entirely, but – in the absence of other promotion or advertising – it’s certainly possible that the new blog site had something to do with the increased business.
And it’s always nice to think that my work on a website is beneficial.
–donna
DLPerry.com
