Ask Dave Taylor: Tech and Business

Saturday

Blogstores: rethinking business blogs as online stores

I work with a variety of different companies on business blogging strategies, but almost all of them are focused on how to get their message into their marketplace, rather than selling specific products or services. But there's really no reason that a weblog couldn't be used as a storefront, and with one of my clients, Waldorf in the Home, we've experimented with doing just that, as exemplified by the Waldorf in the Home Online Store.

The introductory section is obviously unique to this area of the site (and yes, it's dynamically generated so that new blog entries cause the intro listing to change too). You can see the more traditional blog view of things by going to the blog store categories, like Online Store: Parenting.

Now I'm helping my sister out with her splendid Art Dolls.info site and she's moving from just talking about how to make soft sculpture art dolls to actually selling them, based on reader demand.

My question is: who is doing innovative work in this area and what models are out there to help guide us in taking yet a further step towards what I'll call blogstores?