Are you doing what you love? Are you passionate about your vocation?

I have a confession. My passion is writing. While I enjoy helping others set up blogs, writing for a living is all I really want to do. I want to write from home, on my own schedule, and be paid for it. I want to be able to support myself writing books and articles, with occasional speaking engagements to promote the books.

OK. I’ve said it. How do I make the dream a reality?

Via Micro Persuasion, I found a link to MyYawp.com, a site that helps people turn passion into profits. At first I thought it was a company offering consulting services, but as far as I can tell, it’s only a resource site. On My Yawp you’ll find success stories and a six-step plan to turn your passion into profit. I think it’s definitely worth a visit or two.

A yawp is a sharp cry or yelp, and the first place I’ve ever saw the word was Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
…

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

It’s almost criminal to quote so brief an excerpt because it doesn’t do the poem justice, so I encourage you to read the entire piece at your leisure. To learn more about yawping, see YAWPING—A PRIMER.

Following our passion and making money while doing it sounds easy, doesn’t it? I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

What a brilliant idea!

Wayne Hurlbert at Blog Business World writes about the benefits of customer service blogs, but I don’t believe I’ve ever run across blogs dedicated to customer service.

Customer service has got to be up there with telemarketing as an unpopular career choice. Rarely, I’d imagine, do customers call service lines in a good mood. You’re calling to pay a bill, provide proof that you’ve already paid a bill despite the second notice you received, report a problem with a product, or some other not-so-pleasant reason.

With the emergence of big corporations buying out or shutting down smaller companies and Mom-and-Pop stores, owners are often bigwigs behind the corporate veil, remote, unreachable, and seemingly unconcerned about the individual irate customer.

The result? You often find yourself on the telephone with someone who doesn’t like his/her job or doesn’t really care about your problem. They don’t own the company, probably don’t care about the company’s reputation, and couldn’t care less whether you buy from XYZ, Inc. ever again. Customer satisfaction is probably not foremost in their minds, and I doubt they care whether you bad-mouth the company.

But the company suffers. Happy customers say and write good things about the company. For free. Hurlbert writes:

Many studies of word of mouth advertising have discovered that previously disgruntled customers, finding their problem resolved to their satisfaction, often become the firm’s best customer evangelists. They let the world know that your business keeps its clientele happy. Satisfied customers are any business’s best and least cost advertising and client recruitment resource.

He adds that an open and honest dialogue with customers could head off problems, and a real-time customer service blog may be the solution.

A company called ConAgra Foods, Inc., recently benefited from chatter in cyberspace. Apparently it assigned some employees to hang out on message boards and figured out the low-carb fad was fading. ConAgra changed its menu accordingly.

It’s no secret that companies follow blogging trends even if they don’t have company blogs. Following blogosphere chatter is cheap, relatively easy, and valuable. ConAgra probably saved millions by simply surfing to food discussion groups instead of relying on focus groups. If you’re a company with a strong online presence and you’ve got your ear to the “cyber stone” (that was terrible), good for you!

If you’re a company with a weak online presence and you’re not paying attention to the online world, you need to read the linked article and hire me.

From the Washington Post:

Following online conversations is the latest attempt by companies to grapple with the growing clout of their customers. Empowered by the Internet, consumers can broadly express their skepticism of brand icons, demand the lowest prices and mobilize for action. In recent years, many companies have tried to influence consumers by generating their own favorable word of mouth. But measuring sentiment expressed in cyberspace — whether provoked or not — has always been difficult. The high-powered new technologies aim to fill in the missing pieces by searching, tabulating and assessing Internet postings.

To capture the chatter, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a giant in the industry, uses software that collects hundreds of thousands of comments a day. The technology can scan for specific companies, products, brands, people — anything searchable. It can slice data into a range of categories to quantify the number of times a subject was discussed online, the individuals who mentioned it and the communities where it appeared.

Cyber cheap, cyber cool. The web in general and blogs specifically are great places to find out what’s going on with your customers, potential customers, products, competitors, and consumer trends. Catch the wave and surf into the 21st century.

(Image from An Atlas of Cyberspaces)

The old “Do as I do, not as I’ve done” adage has been updated and neatly packaged in a free e-book authored by business blogger Rich Brooks. He blogged it back in November 2005. I drafted a post and saved it but forgot about it. No matter. The e-book is still free.

My business model has shifted in the last few months. As I focus more on providing web site content, I’ve shifted away from creating web sites and doing online marketing. As of February 22, 2007, I’m no longer accepting new blog creation and online marketing clients, at least for the foreseeable future. The same applies to editing, proofreading, and manuscript typing clients. 

On a limited basis, I’m accepting new clients looking for a blogger/copywriter. If you need content for your existing blog and/or web site, contact me.

• Blog consultant B.L. Ochman links to three blogs run by a jewelry company called Ice.com. One blog, Sparklelikethestars.com, uses a simple design but includes photos of stars and jewelry to create a visual balance. The blog isn’t a blatant sales pitch; product links are integrated within personal commentary and entertaining tidbits.
  
  Whoever “icegrrl” is (and “rahulio”), she knows blogging.
• PR blogger Steve Rubel points to a new blog by the makers of Guinness beer. The company created the blog themselves instead of using an ad agency. Aside from the annoying sign-in page (one time only?), it’s a good move. I hope Guinness also blogs about drinking responsibly.
• Are you an ambitious business or personal blogger trying to get on the A-list? Read Climbing Bloggers Hill.
• Blog consultant Wayne Hurlbert blogs about how to say, “Goodbye, blog.”
• Ten reasons why we should LOVE small businesses
• BlogSEO excerpts an article called How to Increase Blog Traffic and Make a Living.
• I saved the best for last! Consultant and blogger Debbie Weil rounds up a very useful list of 101 posts: blogging, podcasting, and RSS.

After a one-sided rant against blogs a few months ago, Forbes redeems itself with a column on how businesses can “tap” into the blogosphere:

Track And Publish Blogs

A chance meeting three years ago between Salim Ismail and Bob Wyman resulted in PubSub. Wyman is the tech brains, while Ismail is the business guy. They built a matching engine that processes about 3 million newly published blog posts per day from more than 21 million sources.

Tracking tools like PubSub allow companies to monitor what’s being said about them, their products, their competitors and other topics of importance. The tools include a tracker that looks at the top 1% of bloggers. “Companies should set up ’subscriptions’ for keywords and phrases relevant to them,” said Wyman.

Non-blogger Tom Taulli offers decent advice on tapping into the ’sphere, so it’s definitely worth reading.

Update (1/27): Perhaps it was something I picked up subconsciously from the Forbes article that caused me to write that the magazine “sort of” redeemed itself or to note that the author is a non-blogger. Or maybe I just know how journalists think when it comes to blogs. I don’t know. In response to a misquote in the article, B.L. Ochman says this:

In endless debate, deadtree journalists love to bash bloggers, saying we’re not really journalists, that we can say anything we want because we have no editors, we don’t have a code of ethics, that our reporting is sloppy and inaccurate, blah, blah, blah.

Don’t they have editors at Forbes?

What I like about B.L. is her direct blogging style and outspokenness, similar to the way I blog on my personal site.

If you run a big company like IBM, you might want to draft a few employee blogging guidelines just to be on the safe side. Jeremy Wright has the scoop on IBM. A few good ones:

Use a disclaimer, respect copyright and fair use laws, protect confidential and proprietary information, protect IBM’s clients, business partners and suppliers, don’t pick fights (no flaming!), and most important, don’t forget your day job.

Read the whole post.

Fellow blog consultant Paul Chaney is soliciting input on current trends/issues related to business blogging. He believes important issues include employee blogs, blog spam, and blog ad revenue.

I agree that those are important, especially employee blogs. If your business is blogging, do have employee blogging guidelines? If your employees have personal blogs, how does your company deal with them?

We all know “inner-city” is code for “black neighborhood,” and we also know that economic development in inner cities is crucial for the revival of gutted areas. The Small Business Association published a report called State of the Inner City Economies: Small Businesses in the Inner City (PDF), and I’m looking forward to reading it.

(Hat tip: Entrepreneurial Mind)

Sprint has a blog titled Things That Make You Go Wireless. The telephone and broadband service provider’s blog “uncovers the stories, conversations, and inside tales of Sprint mobile solutions.”

For people still not sold on blogs, one of the great things about them is how low-maintenance and cost-effective they are. The same kind of information you’d e-mail to hundreds of subscribers or customers can be turned into blog posts, but with an added touch. Blogs put company employees “on the ground,” which makes them more accessible to customers, present and potential. For example, blogging for Sprint is Vicki Warker, Vice President of Product Management & Marketing. According to the bio:

After witnessing a very active blogging community of Sprint consumers, Vicki was very eager to participate with a blog of her own….Vicki is looking forward to a positive dialogue with Sprint users and any others just interested in communications. In the past, Sprint has been very open with their customer base about strategy, and in response customers have returned the favor with valuable feedback.

This information provides a personal, blog-friendly touch that’s desperately needed between customers and companies. If you’ve been caught in an endless automated telephone message loop, you’ll appreciate the accessible and transparent nature of blogs.