Why Would I Want a Business Blog?

Early last year, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report that confirmed what many of us already guessed: More people are using the Internet to help them make important life decisions.

Here’s a bit of what their research discovered about blogs:

• Blog readership shot up an eye-popping 58% in 2004.
• Over 6 million Americans got news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators (the technology that makes reading blogs a cinch—I’ll discuss this in Part 6).
• 27% of Internet users said they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% only 11 months prior. This translates into 32 million Americans who were blog readers by the end of 2004.
• 12% of Internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs, suggesting that the public is starting to catch on to the idea interacting with websites.

Pew concluded that “by the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture.” That was two years ago and I can’t imagine those numbers went any direction but up.

Earlier this year, the Boston Globe discussed blogging as essential for career development for several key reasons, including:

• Blogging makes self-employment easier. You can’t make it on your own unless you’re good at marketing yourself. One of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of marketing yourself is with a blog. When someone searches for your product or service, make sure your blog comes up first.
• Blogging provides more opportunities. Building brands, changing careers, launching a business—these endeavors are much easier once you’ve established yourself online.
• Blogging creates a network. A blogger puts himself out in the world as someone who is interesting and engaging—just the type of person everyone wants to meet.

Blogs have come a long way from the personal journals written by teenagers a few short years ago. And as businesses from Fortune 500 companies to solopreneurs join in, it’s clear they’re much more than a fad.

Blogs as marketing tools are effective for some very powerful reasons:

• Traditional marketing approaches are losing their effectiveness. We’re becoming more jaded about and resilient toward advertising and suspicious of mainstream media.
• Good blogs deliver fresh, unique content—search engines love them far more than static sites.
• You don’t need to be a geek to blog. If you have an Internet connection and can learn a bit of software that’s as easy as email, you can blog.
• Blogging is cost effective. Blogging software costs virtually nothing (and sometimes literally nothing) and the look and layout of a blog can be changed, at little or no cost, to make your blog reflect your voice, your image and your brand.
• As ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse has pointed out, the “new media” is attractive because it involves conversation, collective learning, and being a part of things that are bigger than yourself.

Right down a mediator’s alley, I’d say.

Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.