Hi Everyone. I’m Yaro Starak, the new captain of the ship here at Small Business Branding. I have a few spare moments to write a quick message to everyone reading this blog to let you know what is going on. No doubt a lot of you are probably doing Christmas or holiday activities right now so as shocking as it might sound, you may not be using the net, but in my case a blogger never rests!
Transfer Process
As with any site acquisition there are a few processes that take a while to go through, namely the exchange of the domain name, hosting account, service subscriptions (feedburner, TypePad etc). I don’t know how long it’s going to take but eventually, hopefully within the next few days after Christmas everything will transferred safely.
The biggest problem at the moment is navigating the TypePad exchange. Michael runs many blogs from his TypePad account and Small Business Branding is the main domain (his first blog). Because of this we can’t simply transfer the account into my name because I would also get all of his other domains/blogs along with it! The best solution happens to be a slow one – Michael has to transfer his other blogs away from the Small Business Branding TypePad account. After that is done I will take complete control of it. However I have no intentions of keeping it on TypePad.
Move To WordPress
This blog actually has two addresses, the domain name SmallBusinessBranding.com and the TypePad subdomain, smallbusinessbranding.typepad.com. My intentions are to transfer the main domain to my own servers, migrate the content into a WordPress backend and then get to work pumping out new content and growing the features of the site. However I’d be stupid to completely shut down the TypePad domain and account since there are thousands of links pointing to it and regular search traffic visiting. So I’ll probably leave the TypePad version sitting online as it is with a post stating that the updated blog can be found at SmallBusinessBranding.com.
I’m sure you are not that interested in all the behind the scenes migration issues, you care more about what will happen to this blog.
The Topic
This blog is about small business branding, however as you can no doubt tell from Michael’s past work that can be a very broad topic. In my case I have to play to my strengths and write content from areas I have experience and knowledge to draw from. My area of expertise is online marketing. I have managed offline businesses (including an English School), but where I can offer the most help to you is advice for branding and marketing a small business online, and that’s what my focus will be.
My other blog, Entrepreneur’s Journey, covers the whole gamut of Internet business and money making online. This blog will focus more tightly on topics related to small business owners, independent professionals, and solopreneurs (or savvy solopreneurs as no doubt you are quite used to hearing about!). The angle will be how can these individuals make use of the Internet as a marketing, branding and business tool. No doubt there will be lots of cross pollination between the two blogs and I expect the two audiences share a lot of common traits.
Most folks running Internet businesses, building Internet business or working on making money online are usually independent operators. Some are solopreneurs managing many different projects, others will be strictly devoted to one major start-up. I’m a typical solopreneur, I have an Internet business, I run blogs that earn affiliate and advertising income and I create information and teaching products. Generally though when I blog I write about what works and doesn’t work for me, and you can expect the same here at Small Business Branding.
Stay Tuned
I’ll have more updates for you as things progress getting this blog running again at full speed. In the meantime if you want to know more about my background please head over to my business timeline and you can catch up on all the business activities I have been in or currently manage. I’m really looking forward to further building this blog into an amazing resource for small business owners and solopreneurs and I hope along the way I can meet many of my readers and form new friendships and relationships.
Yaro Starak