Blogger Stories: Mike and Ben Yoskovitz

Mike and Ben Yoskovitz are Blogger Stories' first father and son team. A family business is always a challenge; however, when you build a company on a product that provides personalized, satirical content there has to be more laughs than family conflicts.

Blogger Story Tellers: Father & Son Team, IGotNewsForYou.com
Mike Yoskovitz (dad)

Benjamin Yoskovitz (son)

My father lost his job in April 2005. He's a baby boomer, of the age where finding work in the I.T. industry can be difficult. For many years he had dreamt of starting his own business online, something he could do that would be fun, challenging and let him be his own boss. Shortly after losing his job he decided to go for it and I hopped along for the ride. IGotNewsForYou.com was born.

We started work immediately, mostly planning the business and the website. My dad's focus would be on the administration of the business and programming, but marketing was not his strong suit. One day I said, "Dad, we should launch a blog before we go live with the full site, it'll help generate some buzz and get us out there."

Although in the I.T. field for the past 20 years, his knowledge of blogs and social media wasn't terribly strong, so I set up the blog in January 2006 and showed him how it worked. I showed him the vast number of quality blogs out there on every imaginable subject, and we started posting.

It didn't take long for people to notice, and with a little outreach on my part to like-minded bloggers (interested in satire and entrepreneurship) we slowly, but steadily built an audience. I think my Dad was amazed that people were interested in what we had to say.

The blog allowed us to test different ideas before IGotNewsForYou.com launched, including a writing contest, and generate valuable feedback. Some of the first few people that read our blog became contributors to our site, and have continued to help promote it since we officially went live in April, 2006.

The thing that stands out most from our experience with blogging, even though it's only been a handful of months, is its ability to help you build relationships with people. We've communicated with people that otherwise we may never have met, from amazing entrepreneurs to successful comedians and writers. Blogging democratizes things, it makes you and others that are also blogging incredibly accessible, and I think that's one of its most powerful abilities.

As we continue to develop IGotNewsForYou.com, blogging is a key part of our strategy, as a marketing and communication tool. Without the blog there'd be no business.

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