Blogging power

Ken Schroeppel of denverinfill.com will be leading the SMPS walking tour of Lower Downtown/Central Platte Valley district Friday morning. This image, from his blog, is a 2007 construction photo of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver at 15th and Delgany.

Yesterday, in seeking an image for my blog entry about flying to Denver for the SMPS Conference, I posted a rendering from denverinfill.com. Intrigued by the blog's quality, I emailed this question to blogger Ken Schroeppel.

Your blog is obviously written from a community service rather than ‘personal gain’ perspective, but I’m interested in knowing whether it has helped you develop your own business (or that of practice where you work). If so, could you quantify this – obviously such information would be of relevance for my blog’s readership, several of whom presumably will also be in Denver over the next few days at the SMPS conference.

Here is Ken's response:

Hi Mark, thanks for the email and the blog link. Doing DenverInfill has resulted in personal gain, although it wasn't the primary motivation for creating the site. It hasn't translated into too much work for Matrix, my employer, but we tend to do larger civil engineering projects anyway. But what DenverInfill has caused is my personal name recognition and reputation around the city to skyrocket. Consequently, I am now asked to sit on expert panels, join boards and committees, make presentations to various business and civic groups, etc. Concurrent with that has been exposure in the mainstream media. Over the past couple of years I've been quoted in our main daily newspapers about 30 times and have been quoted in about a dozen local and national magazines or publications, radio interview, etc.
Each time, I always ask that they identify me as "Ken Schroeppel, urban planner with Matrix Design Group and creator of DenverInfill.com." So I'm sure my employer hasn't minded the free publicity either. Of course, I'm also "linked to" by countless blogs and websites. Currently, DenverInfill is averaging about 2,000 visits a day and roughly 20,000 unique visitors a month.

Speaking of SMPS, I was asked to lead a walking tour for your conference. I will be giving a tour of our Lower Downtown/Central Platte Valley district on Friday morning. Perhaps I'll see you there. If not, please take time to enjoy Downtown Denver before you head to the mountains (I read your blog)!

regards,

Ken

Solid evidence, indeed, of the reason and power of effective blogging.