The Bigwag Blog Century Mark - secrets for other local businesses

This is our monumental 100th post. Not too bad for a fairly young blog. Why do I keep up with a blog for a small pet business? Is it because we're crazy? I refuse to answer that last question on grounds it may incriminate me.

It's fairly common knowledge that newspapers are on the decline. Readership has diminished over the years. More and more younger people are turning to blogs for their source of news and information. I'm 36, and blogs and the Google RSS reader are pretty much my entire source of news these days. The RSS feeder allows me to digest a lot of articles every week quickly, including my local news.

Why is this important? Surely there are more important things we could write about.

The concept for us started back with the Menu Foods pet food recall. Our customers were starving for information, and trust was at an all time low for packaged dog food. We didn't have a good way of getting updates out to our customers, so I began researching what could we do that we could post news updates and blurbs to. By the time we figured out we could write a blog, most of the recall news had subsided, but the blog still seemed like a good idea. Our blog has evolved over the months to be more of a community, where we let you into our world, talk about products we found that are remarkable, keep you up to date on important news we find, and maybe even give you a laugh or two.

As a small business, a blog is an invaluable marketing tool. I think it's important for every small business to find a niche that they can use a blog for. For us, binding the pet community together seemed like a natural extension of our newsletter, our customers, and the events we participate in. It's just one of the tools that help people transcend from "Know about us", to "Trust us", and finally to "Love Us". It allows us to feature other pet businesses in NW Arkansas, talk about the pet community, and give glimpses inside a real dog bakery - which is a fairly new concept for NWA. The products we feature or review are typically items that "actually work" or performed better than we would have guessed, or are super nutritional for your pet. We try not to just post advertisements for products that we have overstocked and want to sell through on. So far, they haven't really been about our every day treats either.

So, what benefit has our blog given our business? Well, our website traffic has increased 1200% since this time last year. Our internet orders had increased 400%. More people find us, and have a chance to really learn about the folks that you are trusting your pets health with. Few companies give that kind of transparency, let alone local businesses, and I think that feeds the "Trust Us" level that we work very hard to get to. I think it's important for our customers to hear stories like: we've been trying to figure out how to make doggie suckers and pops, because a customer asked us about some they saw somewhere else, but the only thing we can find to use for the stick are rawhide straws, and we refuse to carry rawhide, so we still don't have any doggie suckers or pops. We're keeping our eyes peeled for a natural, non-rawhide, popsicle stick idea, but still haven't come up with anything. If anyone has a good idea - please let me know!

Someone might ask, "Whats he got against rawhide?" The information is there, but what you might not know, is that it is largely a personal choice for me. I had to extract a piece of rawhide from my dogs throat to save his life several years ago. A little research turned up rawhide was dangerous to swallow, and I don't know of any dogs that don't try and swallow rawhide chew toys.

It's impossible to convey that kind of information in a newspaper advertisement, or at least we haven't come up with a good way to yet. There are still a lot of people that hear the term "Dog Bakery" and think birthday cakes, or trips for treats after the vet or groomer. What they don't know (yet) is that we feel a personal responsibility to elevate your pets lives, through nutrition, better health, aroma therapy products that actually work, toys that challenge and expand their minds, chews that are made in the USA and are 100% digestible. We help dogs that have food allergies, dogs that are diabetic, dogs that need tougher toys, and dogs that need homes.

More and more people research products and companies on the internet first. Having a great internet presence is not optional any more. I feel like our internet presence really speaks to who we are about, and once a customer loves you, half of the battle is done. The other half is delivering on your promises day after day.