Web business explained

Business blogging is a great way to promote your website and can even earn you direct income. It is not, however, a magic bullet. Blogging most likely won’t make you rich. It won’t instantly increase your page rank or bring you tons of visitors. It’s just a tool. If used correctly, blogging will help your business. If used incorrectly, it’s just a waste of time and resources.

Before you consider starting a blog you might ask yourself a couple of questions:

• Do I love what I’m doing enough to want to share it?
• Am I willing to spend a fair amount of effort doing so?

Notice that there is no mention here of making piles of money or of short circuiting the time and effort required to succeed. Actually, in today’s competitive internet, making your blog successful requires the same effort that any business does. If you can learn to enjoy the process and understand the rules you stand a good chance of succeeding. If the process of blogging seems awful you don’t. A number of clients have had me set up blogs for them because some expert told them they needed one. It should come as no surprise that those blogs don’t get updated often enough to bring any real benefit.

The 4 simple rules of business blogging success:

1. Offer a good product.
2. Promote your product.
3. Provide follow-up service.
4. Continue to do all of the above.

Offer a good product

The first point shouldn’t need a lot of elaboration. A good blog offers good content, which might include articles, podcasts, free downloads, helpful tips, links to other interesting sites, or photos. There are many ways to give value to your visitors. Unfortunately, more and more people are offering poorly disguised advertisements in the place of real content. If you look on a blog as a way to get free advertising and don’t provide people with something of substance you get what you deserve: little or nothing. I’m reminded of the song “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free.” Ads disguised as blog posts are nothing. And, you can’t fool people long enough to build any kind of readership by offering nothing.

Promote your blog

Promoting you blog is time consuming. Whether that time is a burden or blessing to you will determine your ultimate success. I think there are two important points to consider here:

• Blogging takes place within a community
• Visitors have nearly unlimited choice

A community of peers

The simplest and least expensive way to build a readership is to realize that blogging takes place within a community and that being an active member of that community will build your visibility. There are multiple ways to participate. Some of the most common are:

• Participate in forums relating to your field of interest
• Participate in social networking sites.
• Post articles to sites like EzineArticles, GoArticles and iSnare
• Submit press releases
• Post quality comments to related blogs
• Make it easy for people to add your blog to social bookmarking sites like digg,
  reddit and del.icio.us.

The list of possible approaches to site promotion can go on to fill books. My point here is to highlight the community aspect of blogging. If you can enjoy participating this way then you can be successful in promoting your blog.

Make choosing you worth your visitor’s time

Before I go any further, I want to suggest that you read

The Cluetrain Manifesto, a list of 95 points describing the revolutionary changes that the internet has forced upon business. A couple of points I’d like to emphasize are that:

• “People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors”
• “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.”

Hyping your product or service instead of providing real value simply won’t work. It’s too easy for people to double check anything you say. You’re competing with too many others who have a clue and offer quality content. Why should anyone waste their time with your self-promotion if you don’t also offer real value?

Follow up

At first it may not be obvious how you can provide service on a blog. It all comes back to participating in a community. A community fosters conversations. If you think of your post as the opening round in a conversation and not a pronouncement from on high then it becomes clearer. Offer comments and answer questions that commenter’s ask. Be civil and realize that what appear to be attacks often arise from a lack of skills on the commenter’s part. If a nasty comment seems to be flame bait, either calmly respond, delete the comment, or ignore it.

Keep on keeping on

One or two great posts might get you listed in a high profile site and dramatically increase your traffic. For a very short while. As with most things in life, success builds on success, which requires constant effort. So keep a fairly consistent schedule of posts. Intermittent efforts won’t encourage your visitors to return at regular intervals or, better yet, add your feed to their regular reads.

Blogging is work. It is also an excellent way to market yourself. If you learn to enjoy the process, participate in the larger internet community, and post consistently, you will build your readership and benefit your business or even make money directly. Personal publishing is what the internet is really all about. Jump in. The water’s fine.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.