It’s not often we get to toot our horn around here, but when we can, I like to play it loud and play it often.  I was reading through the comments section of the blog and noticed that Alex has given us a link to a Wall Street Journal article by Sarah Needleman entitled Blog It and They May Come. The article discusses small businesses and their blogging campaigns.  It was a nicely written article and it does point our some of the problems we see from small businesses, this blogging thing is work.

To my pleasant surprise, about half way through the article I saw a familiar name.  I was looking at a past client that used our services and is now being interviewed and quoted in the Wall Street Journal!

Making the Link

Ty’s Toy Box Inc., an online retailer based in Erlanger, Ky., has lured people to its blog about trends in the toy-licensing industry by having other blogs and Web sites link to it. The company arranged a link-exchange agreement in April with TheToyGuy.com, a Web site from toy-industry expert Chris Byrne that features news and product reviews.

“We coordinated it so that occasionally our blog and Chris’s blog are about the same issue, but from different perspectives,” says George Stolpe, vice president of business development and media relations for Ty’s Toy Box. The two blogs link to each other in each post, he says.

Ms. Melberg says the links help boost a company’s search-engines ranking because blogs recommended by external sources rank higher than ones without link referrals.

According to Mr. Stolpe, Ty’s Toy Box pays a free-lance writer to maintain its blog and says the total cost for it is “a very minimal amount.” He says while he can’t quantify the blog’s role in the near-triple-digit average growth in sales every year since its start, he has no doubt it has played an important part.

After seeing that I was proud of Ty Simpson and George Stolpe for sticking it out and seeing the power of blogging.  They paid one of our bloggers for a while and decided on a different path but finally stuck to it in the long run and now they are a feature in the Wall Street Journal.  I’m not saying all of our client’s will be this much of a success, but if I have anything to do with it you can bet I’ll try!