(Published Monday, January 8, 2007 12:00:02 PM CST)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
By Stacy Vogel Gazette staff
Brian Brown suspects many of his clients wear pajamas to work.
And sometimes he joins them.
Brown, 35, is the owner and sole employee of Pajama Market, a blog consulting agency he runs from his Janesville apartment. Brown designs blogs and offers blogging advice to small businesses all over the country, charging a cool $500 per blog and $100 an hour for additional consulting.
Brown started a Web site design company four years ago but made the switch to blogs in June after reading the book "Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers."
Blogs, or "Web logs" for the non-technologically savvy, offer more user-generated content than a traditional Web site, Brown explained.
Brian Brown started a Web site design company four years ago but made the switch to blogs in June. The Janesville company, Pajama Market, helps businesses talk with customers without traditional Web-style barriers.
Bill Olmsted/Gazette Staff
"It's having a conversation with your customers without any barriers," he said. Unlike Web sites, where businesses feed information to consumers, "a blog has the ability to be a two-way conversation."
The Janesville Performing Arts Center is beginning to see the benefits of these conversations. Brown, who lives above the center in the Marshall Apartments, volunteered to create and maintain a blog for it.
The results have been better than expected, said Executive Director Laurel Canan.
"Our main goal with the JPAC blog is to get some exposure with the younger Internet users," she said. "We've had people stop and tell us they've seen the blog and they like the way it's almost instantly updated with photos from the event the night before."
Besides his voluntary effort with JPAC, Brown has designed more than 20 blogs for small businesses throughout the country in the last six months, he said.
Yet the blog consultation industry is still a very small market at this point. Brown estimates there are about a dozen professional consultants nationwide, and he is the only one he knows of focusing exclusively on small businesses.
His efforts have gained the attention of national media, such as USA Today and "Entrepreneur" magazine, which will feature Brown in an article next month.
But Brown doesn't expect to ride the blog wave forever. He predicts that a new technology will replace blogging in the next five or six years.
"I can't foresee anything that will replace blogs, but 10 years ago, we didn't even know what blogs were," he said.
"When it does start to transition into something else, I'm sure I'll sort of figure out what that is and adapt."
