Fred Wilson: Blogging Success in 2007

Business 2.0's most recent cover story, How to Succeed in 2007, includes a lot of the sort of business advice you'd expect from a group of entrepreneurs and celebrities. There are the usual admonishments to "keep things simple" or "pay attention to your customers". But tucked in amongst the boring stuff is Fred Wilson's unusual recommendation: Build a blog that builds your business.

Though there's a short except on the Business 2.0 site, the longer version of Fred's piece on his own blog is well worth a read, even if you're familiar with the benefits of business blogging. Fred summarizes the reaction he's seen to his blog:

Many of my readers tell me that they love the diversity of the posts I do. They come for the technology and venture capital stuff but enjoy getting to know me through the other stuff. I think this is critical. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading your blog needs to be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like on YouTube. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what I think is happening in the technology, Internet, and venture capital markets.

It seems to work. About 50,000 people each month come to my blog.

Fred does a wonderful job of talking about how a blog can build your business, and has useful digressions along the way that discuss how you might want to keep your personal and professional blogs separate, as well as providing some specific details about the measureable impact his blog has had.

But just as important to me is the personal story behind Fred starting his blog:

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started my blog. I met Mena Trott (founder of Six Apart which makes Movable Type blogging software and the hosted Typepad blogging service) at a party at Nick Denton’s apartment. She was in town to launch Typepad. I asked her what Typepad was. She told me I could set up a blog in about two minutes in Typepad. I was curious so I went home and did just that. I haven’t looked back since.

I was at that party, and it was just one of many times that I've had the chance to see someone like Mena, who cares about blogging, explain the potential of a blog to someone face-to-face. In this case, it became a big enough part of Fred Wilson's life and career that he's continued the spread to the word. Now Fred's the one talking to new people about starting a blog -- it'll be exciting to see whom he's inspired to start building their career using blogs.