Ileane Smith, known in social media circles as Ms. Ileane, is founder of Basic Blog Tips (BBT), a site that seeks to inform consumers about how to reach their blogging goals and have fun along the way. Based in Philadelphia, she is talks regularly with many early adopters, innovators and leaders in the field of SEO, blog tips and monetization. Because she functions in a community of game-changing, new media influencers and has built a business centered on engagement, we met up with her to learn about the role of engagement in building her business.
BlackEnterprise.com: How did BBT get started?
Ileane Smith: I actually started blogging in 2009 by accident. My daughter Nikki started a free WordPress blog. I thought I was signing up to follow her blog, but it turned out that I was actually signing up for my own blog.
Once I realized what I’d done, I got excited about being able to put my thoughts out on the web for everyone to read. Even today I’m amazed by how empowering it is to have a blog. In those days my biggest challenge was finding good tutorials and instructions for how to navigate the dashboard and other technical aspects of blogging. I found myself hunting for tutorials on “YouTube University” and its support forums, like Lisa Irby’s Website Babble. I had not begun to think about how an engaged community supports the bottom line.