Monday, May 09, 2005
Blogs: Your Handshake With Your Consumer
Thanks to Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing for leading me to this article on blogs and small business.
I think the scepticism about blogs as a business and marketing tool is misplaced. Most of the skeptics, IMHO, are people who have either not seen significant gains from their blogs or want to find a reason not to start one.
I think it all depends on what you’re trying to do with your blog. If you expect to make a fortune in sales within a few months of starting out, you’re obviously setting yourself up for failure.
Keep your expectations realistic. A blog is not a selling tool, but a medium of communication.
For me my blogs are not only a way to add regular content to my site more easily and boost my search engine rankings, but have given me a lot of exposure in my industry, helped me grow my influence and share my opinions and views with more people than I could have reached through my newsletter.
The increase in sales and profits that accrue from that growing reach is just the icing on the cake for me. 
As the article says:
Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal level -- and keep them visiting a company's Web site regularly.
While any size company can use such a strategy, small businesses may benefit most: Blogs offer little-known small businesses name recognition, and the chance to boost traffic well beyond what they'd get if they were simply offering goods and services for sale.
"It's a new way of communicating, rather than marketing," says Charlene Lee, an analyst at Forrester Research. Like other forms of publishing, blogs attract the largest audiences when they avoid overt commercialism and deliver compelling and credible content, Ms. Lee says.
Although financial rewards can be hard to measure, many small-business owners also use blogs to establish reputations as authorities in their fields or to provide how-to advice.
Starting a blog can reap big increases in Web site visitors within months, thanks largely to search engines' enthusiasm for the medium.
Quality blogs tend to rise higher on search-results pages because other Web sites link to them. Engines like Google consider those links virtual popularity votes and use them to help determine display order.
Like Paul, I loved the quotes from Stonyfield Farms CEO Gary Hirshberg, who said, “Blogging is one of a wide range of ways that we can connect with people [and] strengthen what I call our handshake with the consumer” and that a blog is “as intimate and personal as somebody sitting in your kitchen.”
