I’m always looking for small entrepreneurial businesses that demonstrate how a smart business blog can help raise your visibility in the community, gain traffic, and improve your sales. It’s not always easy, between the ceaseless stream of advertising blogs (I will mercifully not link to any here) and the boring sites that aren’t even of interest to target customers, to the random flow-of-consciousness sites that are 20% on topic, 80% drivel and unrelated.
That’s why I was delighted when I bumped into the simple, elegant, and interesting Your Daily Art weblog. Written by Martha Cleveland, the site presents a photograph of a piece of art, adds a little background information, and does it all to drive business to her Youngest Daughter line of jewelry. Brilliant!
Here’s today’s entry, to whet your appetite:

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Dance at the Moulin Rouge, 1890 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in the world of dance halls, becoming friends with the performers. He saw the upper class men of his birth, visit these lower class venues looking for drink and prostitutes and must of felt that at least his working friends in the venues were the more honest about who they really were.

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Why is this so appealing? Because Martha has figured out that having pictures of her jewelry products as a weblog are not going to be very compelling to people, however attractive her designs. So instead of trying to force fit, she’s taken a different tact, producing an aesthetically pleasing and darn interesting blog that actually adds value to the blogosphere.
I envision a local musical group having a similar sort of approach where they’d link to an MP3 of them playing a famous piece of music, then have commentary from the various members of the group about the composer, the challenges of playing the piece, what they visualize as they proceed through it, etc. In fact, I’ve already suggested just such a blog to my friends at the Boulder Chamber Orchestra.
The only wrinkle with Your Daily Art that I see is that it’s not attracting just Martha’s target audience of jewelry buyers. It’s not exactly on focus. Remember, the smart goal for online businesses is to attract more customers not just more visitors. Nonetheless, there’s a certain aesthetic shared between those who can appreciate the arts and those that would be interested in buying decorative jewelry, I think, so it’s not too far off.
Just as importantly, I imagine it’s darn fun to come up with the art of the day, do a bit of research into the artist and the piece, and enjoy helping people expand their horizons artistically.
Kudos to Martha for her Your Daily Art weblog.
Anyone seen any other terrific, simple examples of leveraging blogging as a traffic generator for an entrepreneurial business?