Why we blog

So I was in Miami yesterday doing the usual partner breakfast and we started chatting about blogs and the recent sale of Websonic to AOL and the conversation took a turn to trying to make money of the blogs, especially Natasha’s idea to cash in on the Microsoft community blogs. I personally don’t believe in that at all, but yesterday gave me some extra ammo to fight the blog “gold-rush”.

Why do you blog?

So why do we blog? In my case, it is to spread information. I work with a ton of partners and running a mailing list is just not an option at all. I don’t post anything here that I would not be comfortable sending in an email. It is also my resource directory – I’m at pretty much every Microsoft roadshow in Florida and every time we break I get surrounded by a dozen people with questions. Ordinarily, this involves handing out links and spouting off names – now I can point them here. Why? Because when you spend some time frustrating yourself with a problem and you find the solution – you want to share it. And two months later, when you forget how you solved it in the first place there is a place for you to find the step-by-step. It works, it keeps me happy and it keeps people reading this blog happy.

How do you cash in on it?

Truth of the matter is – you don’t. This is not a business, a PR division of Vlad Mazek, or a marketing outreach. It’s just my blog. Like a tech web page. As you’re reading this (and re-reading, wtf is he trying to say? God damn illiterate people on the Internet) you realize fairly quickly that I’m not a journalist. If I wanted to pretend to be a newspaper I would at the very least spell check some of this.

Anyhow, this one is a bit personal: don’t expect to make money with blogs. Just yesterday I got an email from a fellow SBSer that I was helping on the list. Here was his email:

Say, Vlad … any chance you can match (insert competition here) price of unlimited SharePoint users and 500 MB of storage for $20 / month?

I certainly appreciate all you do for the SBS community, but business is business … 8^)

Ouch. So he appreciates all the free help, but won’t shell out the few extra bucks to get the kind of support he knows I already am capable of providing. Why should he? Save a few bucks by going with the cheaper technical solution, then ping Vlad for free help. How would you respond? Here is my response:

First of all thank you for your kind words and bringing this to me.

Unfortunately, no, I can’t beat bottom-dollar hosting; it is not the kind of service we are out here to provide. I understand that business is business and I understand you have to go with whoever provides the best deal.

Again, thanks for giving me a chance on this one, I appreciate it. Best of luck with our competition.

Never hurts to be polite. He sends me a followup email and I reply trying explain to him how the licensing works, what the difference is, which questions he needs to ask to figure out the “apples and oranges” argument – how to you backup, which antivirus software do you use, how many domain controllers for each domain, what are machine specs, how many users are on them, how much are “extras” and who answers my support questions… But here is the interesting thing – two emails in the thread later, he sends me two more technical SharePoint questions. Now this is an IT consultant, mind you, that earns money by providing advice. But he expects me to give it to him for free.

Now, would you be willing to help? I mean, if you were in this blogging and community thing solely for the commercial purposes, you would tell this guy to go.. well, I’ll leave the creative writing aspect to someone else.

Point is: You cannot objectively be willing to help people if all you are doing is trying to make $$$ out of it. I get questions from people asking “Should I blog, what should I write about, how do I get involved” and there is really no clear answer to that other than “Because you want to.” If you don’t want to help people, questions like “My Exchange Information Store stopped. Whats wrong” will make you jump out the window. You blog because you think you have something insightful to say.

You participate in the community because you care about the community. You answer questions because you have the answers and you know that if you have the answer and are willing to share it, when your question comes up there will be someone out there to answer it too.