Crazy marketing idea: Record your work.

Recording your work for promotional goals works when your audience can do your job. Watching a chef will teach you how to cook. A programmer may enjoy watching you code.

When your target audience doesn't directly have the skills to understand the raw footage, that's when editing comes in. Think of all the documentaries on PBS. They address I know nothing about, but provide me with enough background information that I can follow what is going on. And in the process, I learned something. Which is great.

Crazy marketing idea #2: Put a link to your main website (i.e. getworkflo.com) somewhere on your blog.

Read this article, saw the name and thought, "Hm, what is this workflo product? I'll just click here on the top navigation...no...maybe the about page?...no...surely on the sidebar...no...footer???...nope." Finally, I just removed the "blog" subdomain from my browser's address bar in defeat.

Surely this is an obstacle you don't want other visitors to your blog to have to overcome.

I think there are certainly advantages to exposing your working process to your customers (and other folks who you may have need to market to -- my business gets a lot of links because I have a blog that vanishingly few of my customers ever read, links lead to SEO, etc etc). However, I'm not seeing the gain between presenting focused highlights from your process and a live stream.

Its sort of like "reality" television. After capturing several weeks of film, it gets edited to within an inch of its life and strung into a narrative framework by trained writers, to provide a 30 minute episode. With commercial breaks.

An unedited stream of what I did to, e.g., fix a bug worthy of a blog post would be confusing (bordering on incomprehensible) to anyone without encyclopediatic knowledge of my code base and work practices. Which is, well, everybody but me.

Would love for this to be true, but I really want to hear a success story from someone who actually build an audience on unscripted day-to-day work recording.

This might be ok for some types of business, but for software development it would make very tedious viewing. There would be long boring periods where I'm not typing or appearing to be doing anything at all, then brief periods of furious typing.

There are a few technical bloggers I follow that I might watch a few 'at work' screencasts.

However, I think I prefer the polished type of screencast where, for example, someone shows good use of Emacs + Slime working with a remote server (just an example :-)