|
Compared to the early adopters, it took me a long time to start my blog. But once I joined the blogosphere in June 2008, I quickly found myself in good company.
According to e-Marketer, there were approximately 25.1 million bloggers in the U.S. in 2008, with that number estimated to grow about 3 percent this year alone. As a blogger, however, the more interesting statistic to me is blog readership, which was estimated at 86.8 million in 2008—or 45 percent of all U.S. Internet users.
Hopefully you’re in that 45 percent of blog readers. But are you capturing any of those readers for yourself?
Just as there’s no one business model that’s right for everyone, there are no perfect solutions for getting your business noticed and customers and/or clients knocking at the door. But a well-written, well-focused blog can be an effective way of promoting yourself by adding value for your multiple stakeholders.
Here are three simple reasons why you might want to start a blog: content, thought leadership and “street credibility.”
Savvy business owners today, especially those of us in the communication field, know that content is critical—and that it is no longer enough to put up a static, brochure-style web site. In the Twitter-YouTube-Tumblr age, people expect to see fresh, original and relevant content when they visit a web site. Blogs offer an easy way to refresh your content, be it via text posts, links, photos, audio or video.
Marc Meyer, founder of Digital Response Marketing Group in Naples, Florida, and author of Direct Marketing Observations, points out that “search engines love social media…and a blog offers a way for your company to be found.” Search engine optimization, or SEO, matters, and new content is critical to getting your name and/or your company’s name ranked highly by Google and other search engines.
As a small business owner, I knew early on that people doing key word searches for marketing, PR or communication weren’t likely to find me. There’s too much competition for attention. But I also knew that potential clients typically either did a web search on my name or company name, or went directly to my web site, before they talked to me—and adding a blog would both make it easier to find me and give them added value once they did.
Which brings me to my second point: thought leadership. A blog is a great way for you as a solopreneur, freelancer or small business owner to showcase your expertise while at the same time reminding people of your competitive edge. It’s a calling card without making a cold call, a marketing pitch without having to push out a marketing message. In fact, I started my blog with three goals:
- Be relevant—by focusing on where my business was focused, which is a mix of business and communication strategy, including social media.
- Add value—by writing posts that would be of interest to my broad community, including current and potential clients.
- Showcase my thought leadership by essentially doing the first two things well.
Despite a lot of talk these days about thought leadership, I’m not sure it is any more important to business success now than it has been in the past. The difference today is that our wired world allows us to reach more people, more quickly.
If content and thought leadership are critical to your business, so is street cred. If thought leadership refers to your intellectual capital, then street cred is your community capital, that added value that helps you build relationships with clients, customers, prospects, partners and the world at large.
Meyer wrote a great blog post a few months ago about “virtual street cred,” in which he said that “at some point your bio, your connections and the number of followers you have are going to mean nothing unless you can back it up with true hands-on experience and knowledge.” While his post was about how Twitter accelerates relationship building, blogs can serve the same purpose.
Just ask A.J. Leon, a social media consultant and co-founder of the LaC Project in New York City. Leon has a photo blog, A.J. in the Big City, which he calls “a way for people to get to know me, and an interesting way for me to connect with people.” Scan through the photos and what he terms the “Twitter-like captions,” and you get a glimpse into Leon’s work projects, family and how he spends his time. What gives Leon his street cred is that he’s letting you into his life, so that by the time I talked to him for this article I felt I knew him already. Ditto for the first time I talked with Meyer several months ago.
Which brings me back to my blog. If you stop by, you’ll see lots of targeted content, but not (as of yet) a lot of conversation. But these conversations are happening—offline. I talk all the time to people who tell me they’ve read my blog and like what I’m doing with it, find a particular post insightful, or appreciate that I’ve shared a link. The point here isn’t me. It’s that blogging can be an important addition to your business portfolio.
Daria Steigman runs Steigman Communications LLC, and advises clients on business and communication strategy and public affairs. She also blogs about business, entrepreneurship and social media on her Independent Thinking blog. She can be reached at +1 202.244.7651 or
. |
