Blogging your gardening business

Like all generations of business there is a natural evolution, skills and ideas are passed down as a business matures. With this is mind I turn to the very medium I am writing on here - Blogging.

Computers are still relatively young. I started with an Amstrad word processor in 1988 but its functions were limited. Web access, forget it! It wasn't even available and our first website wasn't produced until about 1998.

Then all of a sudden the web became another tool in which to advertise your wares. In the beginning websites were usually amateurish, slow and were not a great reflection of the business it was trying to represent or project.

Websites were also expensive to produce and usually so static that visitors became bored with what they saw. The companies that helped produce them were also charging a lot even if it was to upload a photo.

Today there are an array of tools available and the one that seems to excite companies and individuals alike is the Blog. A blog is an on line diary (weblog shortened to Blog) I pay to use Typepad which is owned by Six Apart  but there are many others too.

I started blogging using Blogger a free service which is now owned by Google.

Blogging gives the creative user a chance to portray their personality which for a potential customer is a far greater experience than looking at a set of static photographs. Written regularly, this outlet allows not only expression and anecdotal experiences but a vision too of where your business is going.

Five lines of text and a photo on a static page tells the reader nothing about you but a short piece accompanied with several photos of how you managed to overcome a problem in a garden before proceeding with the landscaping tells the potential client something about you.

My advice to budding landscapers or gardener is get into blogging and start to express yourself. It is both an advert and extension of your business but more importantly it is a portrayal of your personality.

I have searched the Internet on businesses I know to exist and there are many that do not have a site or they are so old or ineffective the search engines don't pick them up- they are missing such an opportunity.