SmallBizResource Blog -- Women in Business

Wednesday's Woman: BlogHer Cofounder Jory Des Jardins

Posted by Gayle Kesten Wednesday, Oct 8, 2008, 12:36 PM ET

Blogs came onto the Internet scene nearly a decade ago; nowadays, it seems like everyone and her brother has one. But make no mistake: Done right, blogs are a powerful business tool that can put you on the Google map and introduce you to an entire community of potential clients and partners who otherwise would have never heard of you.

Jory Des Jardins (photo, center), Elisa Camahort Page (r.), and Lisa Stone (l.) took that notion a few steps further, seeing a collective opportunity for women bloggers as a whole to come together in the name of exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment. In 2005 the trio founded Blogher.

"What started as a labor of love with a conference for 300 bloggers looking to connect with other women online has become an organization that now produces a conference series reaching nearly 2,500 bloggers, a Web community and news hub featuring a directory of more than 17,000 women's blogs, and an advertising network of more than 2,000 bloggers reaching 9 million unique visitors per month," says Des Jardins, who serves as president of strategic alliances. (Page is COO and Stone is CEO.)

In this interview, conducted via e-mail, Des Jardins discusses why blogging is particularly appealing to working women, what makes for a good blog, and the No. 1 question she's asked at BlogHer conferences.

SBR: How did you meet BlogHer's cofounders?
JDJ: Elisa and Lisa were originally introduced through business colleagues, while Elisa met me at another conference. When Elisa and Lisa first started talking about women and blogging, they decided that three heads were better than two when trying to solve the question, “Where are the women bloggers?”

SBR: What was involved in launching BlogHer? Did you write a business plan, take out a loan, hire Web programmers, etc.?
JDJ: We began by bootstrapping. Initially the founders were consultants in the new media and marketing space and planned the conference around our work, but once we decided to create a second conference, and then a business to better serve the community in early 2006, there was no turning back. We quit our “day jobs” and focused on building the business full-time. We contracted help to help build and sell advertising on our ad network, but it became apparent a year later that to keep up with the demand of bloggers who wanted to join our network, we would need a full-time sales and member recruiting team to accommodate that need, not to mention the technical assistance we needed to enhance our site. By mid-2007 we secured our first round of funding and were able to grow our network eight-fold by the end of the year.

SBR: How do you describe BlogHer to someone who has never heard of it? A blog aggregator? Can anyone participate?
JDJ: At its very core, BlogHer.com is a community of women bloggers that helps women across the Web connect with one another and take advantage of the opportunities that BlogHer creates for them and their blogs, including an advertising network for economic empowerment, conferences for education, and a platform to increase exposure and readership. Anyone can be a part of BlogHer. Whether you are there to read or write, anyone can be a part of the community.

SBR: Why would a small business want to set up a blog?
JDJ: Many blogs set up by businesses, whether small or large, are initially created to provide another avenue in which the company can connect with existing and new users. By creating a blog, you are creating an open dialogue with an audience that is able to receive and exchange information with your company. This dialogue can be extremely useful for the users as they can provide feedback on products and services. For the company, blogs provide direct and targeted information to the users in an immediate and timely manner. And, on very practical terms, search engines tend to find blogs quicker than other Web sites because, ideally, they are continually updated and linked to.

SBR: From a 50,000-foot perspective, why has blogging become so popular? What's the appeal?
JDJ: While there are practical business purposes for starting blogs, a recent benchmark study we sponsored found that the majority of women who engage in blogging do so to meet people like them and to express themselves. Blogging meets a strong, inherent need by empowering people to connect and express themselves cheaply and with little to no technical expertise. It has also come upon the scene at a time when media has irreversibly diversified. We may lose a few cable channels in the future, and no doubt there will be some consolidation of blogs into aggregated formats and traditional media companies, but at this point we expect choice in media and place a great deal on the influence of targeted, niche outlets.

SBR: With so many blogs populating cyberspace (including the rise of the working woman and mommy blogger), is it possible that the market is becoming oversaturated? How can anyone possibly stand out?
JDJ: Yes, blogging has become incredibly popular and the market is overflowing with content, but at the same time companies are only just starting to incorporate online advertising through blogs into their yearly budgets. The economic opportunity is still in the early stages.

At the BlogHer conference we’re always in discussion about maintaining the authenticity and relevancy of our blogs amid increased pressure to partner on commercial ventures, but I find we come to the conclusion that even in the face of these pressures, the value of any blog is determined by its credibility. The cream always rises; quality will always stand out and be valuable.

SBR: What do you hear about from women who attend your conferences? What kinds of unique challenges do they face in the blogging world?
JDJ: A question I’ve heard is how can I make my blogging a business? In order to make a living by blogging, you have to be a consistent blogger, and that’s tough to do when you have another job! Many of the women who attend our conference want to take their blogging to another level.

SBR: What makes for a good small-biz blog? Is there a formula or certain characteristics that make some more popular than others? For example, how often should a blogger blog?
JDJ: Even though I started blogging in the business realm, it’s difficult to say what formula works best. After all, some of the best blogs break the mold! As a very general rule of thumb I would encourage any small business blogger to stay focused on their area of expertise, yet be broad enough in scope to not confine the writer. Good business blogging includes a personal voice, yet it does not have to include personal content. In order to keep up a solid readership, I recommend blogging at least three times a week or more.

SBR: What do you make of microblogging sites, like Twitter? What is their value?
JDJ: I’m still trying to find my stride with microblogging. Before Twitter, I wrote posts that were too long, and now I need to reduce them to 140 characters! But seriously, from the perspective of a marketer, or in my case an observer, there is so much to be learned via microblogging. There’s so much I find immediately when I query through Twitter. And BlogHer has found Twitter to be a great tool for both PR and community relations. Do I think that monitoring your Twitter feed for hours a day is healthy? I won’t say. But microblogging certainly has its uses, even among the unobsessed.

SBR: What do you like and dislike about running your own business?
JDJ: I love having the opportunity to engineer new ways of approaching problems. When you own your own business, you have the pressure of meeting a bottom line, but you are also empowered to play a more integral role in how you will meet those goals. That said, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to put the business away for more than seven hours. You think about it all the time. As someone who was always such a balance freak, I find it surprising how difficult it’s been to find me-time.

SBR: So how do you achieve work/life balance?
JDJ: A few years ago there was an article in Fast Company called "Balance is Bunk!" I won’t say it’s bunk -- it’s a worthwhile pursuit. But when you do try to achieve it all the time, don’t feel bad when you have moments of imbalance; it’s a waste of time. I prefer this model: You should strive for periods of balance. Sometimes you can’t have balance and excellence, and that’s OK.

SBR: How many blogs do you read on a daily basis? Which are your favorites, and why?
JDJ: I wish I had a better answer. I used to read dozens of blogs a day, now I hardly have time to read one. I try to catch up on weekends by reading aggregators. No matter what I read. BlogHer.com always brings me up to speed with what’s hot in the women’s blogosphere. I also enjoy Seth Godin’s blog. I won’t read it for months, then I’ll pop in and wish I hadn’t been away for so long. He puts me back into the big ideas.

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