The Hired Guns Blog

We’re proud to add Bill Brazell to our site. As the first director of author services at Federated Media, a current senior associate at WIT Strategy and blog wrangler at collectivecontext, he’s worked closely with popular sites that include Dooce, Boing Boing, Behance, and many others. He’ll be interviewing some of the stars of blogging and uncovering some tips that the rest of us can use to grow our online presence. So take it away, Bill!

With a few exceptions, bloggers are fun, interesting people. In this series of monthly podcasts, I’ll be talking with a few of the most outstanding ones, asking them to enlighten the rest of us on what makes them so influential, what kept them going in the early days when no one knew they existed, and what blogging has enabled them to do that they might not have been able to do otherwise.

First up is Anita Campbell, editor in chief and founder of Small Business Trends — an award-winning blog for entrepreneurs. Campbell discusses how she accidentally found herself with a sizeable online following for her new site — and more important, how she continued to cultivate it and use it to build her personal brand, both online and elsewhere. She emphasizes that even a small blog can give a big boost to a small business if it targets the right readers: “You don’t need to get millions [of readers] to be successful with a blog.”