Gateway Blogging

Hello, and welcome to Gateway Blogging, a manifesto, book, learning environment, and public experiment in an effort to take business blogging to the next level. Your guides on this tour are Michael Martine, blogging coach and consultant, and author of Remarkablogger; and Greg Balanko-Dickson, author and business coach and author of Small Business Transitions and the SOHO Business Owners Alliance.

In our discussions about blogging and business, we realized there were some gaps between the two that weren’t being filled by the information currently available. When we started to look at this, we saw incredibly fertile ground for improving upon the knowledge and help available to people who are blogging in support of their small business: freelancers, contract workers, consultants, micro-ISVs, and small companies. In other words, people for whom their website often is their business in a very real way.

In some ways we had both been heading in this direction independently. I had always been interested in what makes business blogging different from other kinds of blogging. And Greg had grown concerned about business blogging’s effectiveness and ROI. When we realized that both of us were very interested in helping other businesspeople get the most out of both their business and their blogging efforts, we decided to join forces. I had already invented the term Gateway Blogging and the first time I had written publicly about it was on this Remarkablogger post back in October of 2007. Greg was thinking in terms of generating leads, calling it lead-generation blogging.

When we compared our thoughts on all of this, we realized we were essentially talking about the same thing. We chose to go with the name Gateway Blogging because it was new, catchy, and available as a URL. Coining your own term also means you totally own it in the search engine results pages.

And really, this is good, because what we’re really doing here, as you will see, is nothing less than reinventing business blogging. Yes, I know that sounds horribly immodest, but why not? All of this is still rather new, and we’re inventing what’s needed as we go. We’re laying down the tracks while the train is in motion. Blogging–especially business blogging–is still new enough so that it is still being formed. It is not set in stone. And maybe we don’t ever want it to be.