Brian Brown
Independent Consultant
Pajama Market

We ran Pajama Market as a featured TypePad blog on May 9, 2006.

Tell me a little bit about Pajama Market and the Small Business Blog of the Day.

Pajama Market is my consulting company in Burlington, Vermont. I consult small businesses with their online marketing projects. It's called Pajama Market for two reasons: One, because most of my clients are home-based businesses where they often work while wearing their PJs, and two, because marketing online allows businesses to reach their customers at home, often times wearing their PJs. As I explained to my bank teller yesterday, "No, I actually don't sell pajamas."

I was inspired to create the Small Business Blog of the Day because no one else had done it yet. There are tons of websites giving advice about how to create a small business blog, but almost no websites give actual examples beyond three or four. I thought it was a great opportunity to fill a niche in an industry that is heavily on the rise.

Was Pajama Market your first blog? I know that you also run a community blog for Burlington, Vermont. Did one lead to the other?

I've been running iBurlington.com for over a year longer than Pajama Market, and iBurlington was my first crack at blogging. Other than getting used to reading about a specific subject and writing about it, I would say the two blogs are pretty unrelated. I probably still would have started Pajama Market even if I had never thought of iBurlington.

Did you have an "aha" moment when you knew you wanted to start blogging?

Yes. It occurred during a Vermont Public Radio story highlighting the community blog iBrattleboro.com. I wasn't familiar with the blog format at the time, but listening to the description reminded me of several fan websites I had seen relating to a video game I was interested in. I hadn't realized I had been looking at blogs the whole time nor that they could be applied to anything other than video game fan sites. To see someone using this format for a town instead of a video game was mind-blowing to me. I immediately registered the website iBurlington.com but took nearly a year to actually create the site.

You interview many of the bloggers that you feature. (A great idea!) What's the most surprising thing you hear from small businesses who blog?

I'm always surprised when someone says how much their business has increased because of the blog. Not everyone says this, but the number that do is still amazing to me.

Most small businesses probably aren't aware of the benefits of blogging yet. If you have 30 seconds to sell them the idea, what would you say?

"You're crazy if you're not blogging!!! What are you, stupid???"

Seriously though, my elevator pitch is pretty good: Who wouldn't want to blog? Your search engine rankings skyrocket, you quickly establish yourself as the leader in your field, you tell your audience about every new product or service instantly without spending a dime, you build lasting relationships, you find out what customers are saying about you and actually have an opportunity to respond, you present your company as a living and breathing person, it takes as little as 15 minutes a day, and it costs almost nothing.

What are some of your favorite blogs to read?

43 Folders and Lifehacker for personal productivity. Naked Conversations [Ed. note: featured 3/1/06] for business blogging. Gaping Void has grown on me (I have been assimilated). Over the Monster for all my Red Sox news.

What's next for Pajama Market?

Keep writing posts. At this rate, I'll have a few hundred businesses reviewed in a year, which should make the site a very valuable resource for anyone looking to start their own business blog. I'd like the traffic to be better, but I figure if I keep at it, eventually the word will get out and the quality of the site will make people regular visitors. Of course these mentions from TypePad don't hurt either.

Pajama Market started out by offering daily posts on business blogging strategies and resources, but in the last month or so has developed nicely into the palatial home of the "Small Business Blog of the Day," which features a different company's blog every day of the week. You'll find a detailed review of each site, and for many of them author Brian Brown has contacted the owner for a focussed interview about blogging software, inspirations, aspirations, suprises, and more. (It's a great feature we hope to unabashedly duplicate in the near future!) While we're excited that Brian uses TypePad to power his site, we're perhaps even more excited (and proud) that many of his featured bloggers use Six Apart tools as well. The only thing better than featuring a TypePad site is seeing someone else feature a TypePad site. That's just one of the reasons why Pajama Market is at the top of our feed reader.