Business Avatars & Guest Posting (Under Attack! 2/15/2010)

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

Website In A Weekend is still under a distributed denial of service attack.

This has shut down 4 other blogs I post on intermittently.

Basically, I’m out of business until it either 1. stops, or 2. I change hosts in the hope I’m not the actual target of the attack. I find it pretty hard to believe I would be targeted. I’m a small fish in a big pond.

There are a lot of lessons here. Stick around and learn from my experience.

On to business.

Guest posting

Guest posting is going on hold until this is done. Whether the attack is aimed at Website In A Weekend or not, I have to take it personally. I’ll start the process for moving hosts this afternoon. I’ll be taking my time to ensure I don’t lose any search results. (Permalinks are valuable.) Shouldn’t take more than a week or so.

Once we’re moved, the regular schedule resumes: guest posts, commenting, etc.

Dr. WordPress is going away

If you aren’t familiar with business avatars, there’s another lesson here as well.

The notion is that you idealize your customer (customer avatar), personify your business (business avatar), then the business avatar speaks directly to the customer, one on one.

If you’ve never heard of this, it’s a very well-established principle of effective marketing. For example, if you have purchased a Betty Crocker cake mix, Betty Crocker is the business avatar. I’m sure you can think of many others.

So here’s the deal. Nicholas Cardot published a very good piece a week or so ago concerning credibility. (You can look it up over on Site Sketch 101, and poke around over there while you’re at it, lots of good stuff.) The upshot of Nick’s argument is that they are a few too many people passing themselves off as authorities on subjects they are clearly lacking in knowledge.

I don’t want even a whiff of that on Website In A Weekend.

100% transparency. You can see my face, examine my credentials, read my work, then make up your own mind.

Consider Dr. WordPress retired, effectively immediately.

It’s going to take a couple of weeks to remove all the “Dr. WordPress” references. But it will happen.

For what it’s worth

I wrote this article in about 10 minutes. Writing a dozen a day like this would be no more than boring for me.

Is this what you want?

Think about it. I’ll be reopening comments on everything after moving hosts.