Why Write a Blog for Business?

Why Write a Blog for Business?

In short, because blogs are big. They are becoming mainstream and progressively more widely read, and they draw an attractive demographic. They are search engine-friendly and one of the easiest, fastest and least expensive ways to increase the online exposure of your business.

Research provider comScore Networks has reported that, in the U.S. alone, nearly 50 million people – 30% of the online population – visit blogs (and this figure continues to grow). Further, their study found that blog readers are more likely to have above-average incomes, be younger, use some type of high-speed connection, be heavy Internet users, and are more likely to shop online. “The fact that we found 30 percent of the online population to have visited blogs clearly underscores (their) commercial importance,” according to Dan Hess, senior VP at comScore Networks. While political blogs are the most popular category, tech blogs draw 15% of all visitors, and business blogs draw 3% -- not a huge percentage, but 3% of 50 million is still a nice number.

The comScore study states that blogs are approaching mainstream status: “Blogspot.com now reaches more visitors that NYTimes.com, USAToday.com and WashingtonPost.com.”

Speaking of USA Today, blogs have become sufficiently mainstream that even the nation's newspaper has noticed them. Small business columnist Steve Strauss has written that “For the small business, there is much value that can be derived from creating a blog, not the least of which is that it can become a new profit center. But money is just a small part of the many business blog benefits.” Among the benefits Strauss details are strengthening customer relationships (due to both the informal nature and interactive capabilities of blogs), building your brand, generating leads, improving customer service (keeping customers informed through your blog, though you'll certainly need to use other channels as well), enhancing your reputation (by displaying your expertise), and improving your search engine rankings.

Consultant Suzanne Falter-Bars echoes the blogs-are-mainstream theme and suggests that blogs will displace email newsletters and e-zines. Growing and maintaining an opt-in e-newsletter list has gotten more difficult for several reasons. First, due to their proliferation (almost every business now has a company newsletter – I even get one from my garbage collection service!). Second, due to overstuffed in-boxes, largely because of spam. Third, and related to the last point, over-zealous spam-blocking programs end up preventing many legitimate marketing emails from reaching recipients, leading to low deliverability rates. Fourth, they are a lot of work.

Blogs, on the other hand, are fast and easy to create. Anyone in your company with an interesting story to tell or knowledge to share can contribute. They are less formal than a newsletter. They are interactive. And they are loved by the media as well as by search engines.

Search engines (particularly Google) love blogs, for reasons partly philosophical and partly technical. For example, Google owns blog creation service Blogger. For a more complete technical explanation, check out this article. As this piece also points out, blogs make your site “stickier” and more likely to be revisited by prospects looking for fresh, interesting content. A blog is also far easier to build than a Web site, requiring no knowledge of HTML or FTP. Keyword competition is also less intense for blogs and RSS feeds than for commercial Web sites (through with the rapid growth of business blogs, this is changing).

As blogger Ankesh Kothari has pointed out, blogs are fundamentally nothing more or less than a form of communication. If you can make money using other forms of communication (e.g. email or direct mail), then you can make money with a blog.

According to Marketing Sherpa, only 0.03% of all blogs “are driving sales or prospective customers to their bloggers.” However, by creating a blog that provides real value, and promoting it effectively, you can greatly increase your odds of breaking into this elite group.

Marketing Sherpa estimated that there are approximately 34 million blogs in existence, though Technorati places the number of active blogs at closer to half that number.

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