I make my living blogging.
Literally, that’s not true. My revenue comes from consulting, plus some sponsored white papers and webcasts. The $100 invoice I’ll send this weekend for true blog advertising will be the first such ever. But ultimately, almost all my income depends on blogs. Why? Because blogs are how people find me on the internet, and they’re also a big part of how people judge me once they know who I am.
Sure, Monash Research has a fine website. I hope you visit its sections on services for IT users, vendors, and investors – whichever you may be – and are inspired to buy something. But you probably won’t decide to do so without forming an impression based on what I write, here or on my five other blogs.
In short, blogs are crucial to my business in two ways:
- Proving expertise
- Attracting web traffic
Offsetting those benefits are three drawbacks:
- A blog is a website, and maintaining websites costs some time and money
- People sometimes get mad at what I write
- Blogging well takes a lot of time
The third far overshadows the other two.
For many businesses, the question “Should we be blogging?” boils down in the same way it did for me. Namely, it equates to “Is proving expertise and boosting web traffic worth a significant investment of time?” Well, how much do you invest in customer acquisition? Do customers care about the company behind the product, or just the product itself? If you’re tiny, or if you’re selling an undifferentiated commodity, blogging and indeed most kinds of marketing may be pretty pointless. But otherwise, blogs can be a very effective tool.
