Reviewed By: Anne Holmes

If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet or if you have, but haven’t figured out how to make any money as a result, don’t despair. It’s not too late to learn how to use these new media techniques to build profitability!

Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning “How To Do It Frugally” book series comes to your rescue with a trio of new books targeted at retailers who are just getting started with social networking. The three are part of her “Survive and Thrive” series for retailers.

Your Blog, Your Business is the second in her Survive and Thrive series for retailers. In it Howard combines her expertise in Retail, publishing and online marketing to give you practical ideas on how to:

• Build a blog – she’s narrowed it down to five easy steps
• Minimize the time it takes to run your blog
• Find material you can blog about
• Integrate your blog with your other social network activities
• Manage it yourself – so that your only cost is your time

Before I wrote a blog, I hesitated to get started, thinking that I had nothing worthwhile to say. Howard-Johnson anticipates this and addresses it in her chapter titled “There’s No Such Thing As Bloggers’ Block.”

She even includes a list of retail oriented topics that are supremely bloggable, including

• Your employees
• Your merchandise
• Your buying trips
• Your shopping rants
• Tie-ins to the news – and even current things people are talking about, like TV shows
• Retailing in general
• Your vendors
• Your products
• Your special services
• Upcoming events

And if blogging is totally unfamiliar to you, you’ll appreciate the glossaries with blogging terms defined, writing tips and sample blog entries.

Finally, the best thing about blogging is that it allows you to effectively market your store – and do it for practically nothing!

This little book is a “must have” book for retailers!