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« Blogging for Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters With Filter #3 « Read the whole series: 1,2,3,4,5 » Blogging For Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters With Filter #5 — Posting Frequency »
- Blogging For Business: Dispelling Myths and Clearing The Muddy Waters
- Blogging for Business: Business Blogging v. Professional Blogging Filter #2
- Blogging for Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters With Filter #3
- Clearing The Muddy Waters of Business Blogging: Filter #4 -- Beware The Blogging Evangelists and Enthusiasts
- Blogging For Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters With Filter #5 -- Posting Frequency
Is blogging for business a serious way to achieve and maintain reliable search engine rankings? Yes! Is (true) business blogging a way to open dialog with your ideal audience, build relationships, and have your prospects and clients market WITH you? Yes! Yes! And yes!
But ask if blogs are the place for proactive marketing, and the answer you’ll get from blogging enthusiasts and blog evangelists is — absolutely not! And that’s why this next filter is dedicated to these dangerous purveyors of online advice.
Blogging for business, Filter #4: Beware the blogging evangelists and enthusiasts
Don’t get me wrong, Deborah and I are passionate about the market-equalizing power of blogs and New Media, especially for small business owners. That’s why we wrote the book Secrets Of Online Persuasion. But there’s a difference between the utilitarian passion of a business owner and the idealistic rantings of a digital socialist who advocates the eschewing of any action or activity that has even the hint of capitalism or profit. That, unfortunately, is the poisonous blogging advice that so many of the long-time blogging enthusiasts out there advocate.
The key to this filter is understanding the terms “enthusiasts” and “evangelists“. As I detailed in Part One of this series — you always need to be looking at where so-called “advice” is coming from.
In this case, upon analysis we see that most blogging enthusiasts and evangelists are people who have a regular job. They blog part time. Some do it for fun. Some for release. And others just to have their opinion heard, even if it’s only by a few dozen friends. And that’s all find and good — IF they would keep their “long time blogging” opinions to themselves.
Why is their advice so dangerous for business owners?
First off, because none are business owners. None of them know what it is to need to make sales to keep the lights or heat on. None of them know what it’s like to get and keep a certain number of customers each month or else face losing their home mortgaged to the hilt to finance the start-up of a dream. And none of them ever lost any sleep worrying about how payroll for people in their employ might be met on a particularly tight week.
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A poverty of business experience allows blog evangelists and enthusiasts to spew ideological anti-capitalist guidelines
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With complete poverty of experience in these and many other business areas, blog evangelists and enthusiasts can afford to spew anti-capitalist ideological guidelines. They promote rules that all but threaten burning at the stake for any business owner who dares enter the realm of the blogosphere without adhering to their commandments.
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Secondly, the vast majority of these blogging enthusiasts lack the understanding of how marketing and other capitalist systems work for the good of the entire society. With their biased opinions they slash away at the roots of profitability (intentionally or unintentionally) trying to bring business owners down to their level of existence.
Blog evangelists would have you believe that any active promotion of your product or services on your business blog is a no-no.
Heck, many of these enthusiasts go so far as to promote the idiotic idea that any content that promotes a product or service without a disclaimer to the bloggers affiliation to the company is a violator of the rules of blogging.
I’m sorry, but that’s both biased and hypocritical. That’s like saying that every writer of the NY Times must have in their author’s tag their political affiliation and who they voted for in the last election. I don’t see any out cry for that.
The very people who are trying to tell you that you can’t proactively and (gasp!) even aggressively promote yourself or your company using your business blog , promote their personal view on a whole host of issues on their own blogs. I’ve yet to see an announcement on any of their blogs telling of their affiliations or beliefs.
If you believe in the benefits your products or services have for customers, if you are passionate about the success of your business, and if you care about the welfare of your employees — why should you be any different? Why do you need to give special notice?
It is true that your business blog isn’t the place for a hardcore or in-your-face sales approach.
But it is the precise place for you to be using online persuasion and influence techniques to build trust and develop relationships that naturally lead prospects directly to a solution your company provides. That’s what blogging for business is all about.
This is true not because of adherence to some arbitrary rule set by a blogging evangelist. But it’s true because a business blog is an interactive medium. It’s a relationship building tool that provides insight and connection with you and your business.
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To treat your business blog like a multi-part sales letter would be like driving a full-sized Humvee on the pavement all the time
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To not take advantage of that and treat your business blog like a multi-part sales letter would be like driving a full-sized Humvee on the pavement all the time. You’d never see it’s true capabilities, and you’d burn a lot of gas for nothing.
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Your blog is absolutely the place to promote your business. Just learn to do it with persuasion and influence instead of using typical interruption marketing techniques.
And when surfing the net or perusing your local bookstore for blog coaching and guidance — be aware of where online marketing and bloggin advice is coming from. Be sure it’s coming from someone who has the same goals and beliefs as you.
In the next installment of Blogging For Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters, we’ll look at yet another filter that will help you distinguish between business blogging and blog evangelists.
Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Full copyright reserved by RPM Success Group inc. Bloggers and journalists are welcome to link to posts or excerpt so long as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.
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John-Paul Micek is a Business Acceleration Coach with four multi-million dollar businesses under his belt and over 8000 hours of experience helping entrepreneurs like you get the profits, performance, and lifestyle you want from your business. He’s a published author (Secrets Of Online Persuasion,) a weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and professional speaker. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].
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Article Series - Blogging For Business
- Blogging For Business: Dispelling Myths and Clearing The Muddy Waters
- Blogging for Business: Business Blogging v. Professional Blogging Filter #2
- Blogging for Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters With Filter #3
- Clearing The Muddy Waters of Business Blogging: Filter #4 -- Beware The Blogging Evangelists and Enthusiasts
- Blogging For Business: Clearing The Muddy Waters With Filter #5 -- Posting Frequency
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August 23rd, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Oh dear, I don’t suppose a little thing like evidence, or examples, would be too much to ask?
My first reaction, as a self-styled blogging evangelist, who is in fact a business owner, was to be annoyed at your jeremiad against all the people you choose to tar with one brush.
Then the light went on - one of the oldest marketing tricks is “they are all wrong and ripping you off, listen to me and I’ll look after you.”
No doubt you are laughing all the way to the bank. As we say in Australia, good luck to you.
August 24th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Aloha Des and thanks for your comments.
I’d be perceived as attacking people personally if I were to mention names. But I’m actually glad you brought that up. To clarify a little more on dangerous statements, you can pretty much count anyone who infuses their blogging advice with impractical or anti-capitalist “guidelines.”
By that I mean statements made about business blogging like “a blog should look like a blog”, “to be a (small) business blog the owner needs to be the one blogging”, “you must link prolifically”, “a blog is not the place for sales”, “paying for content creation will destroy blogging”, “generous bloggers publish full text feeds”… on and on I could go.
But you get the point. These and many more ridiculous statements made by well meaning blog enthusiasts confuse business owners and make them shy away from the New Media Marketplace.
Why should business owners be made to feel like they’re doing something wrong with a business blog if they have someone else create content for them? (and why would their prospects and clients care if they got what they wanted?)
Or why should a business owner learn the hard way by having their content show up on kiddie porn sites that “full context feeds” are NOT necessarily the way to go?
Business blogs are certainly a critical component of a marketing system that works in the marketplace of the New Millennium. But I’m sure with your experience you’d agree that far too many business owners are just not getting it. And you have to ask yourself why that is. I believe strongly that it’s because of the impractical advice being handed out by bloggers with no business ownership experience.
As far as marketing tricks… frankly, there is nothing that annoys me more than that type of approach. If you read this entire series including the lengthy introduction, you’ll see that it was out of my passion for business owners (and their needs, wants, and desires) that I decided to clear the muddy waters.
When it comes to small business owners and online marketing my intention is clear. Whether their needs are met by your business blogging ebook, Andy’s introductory book Blogwild, one of our products, or our upcoming book Secrets Of Online Persuasion — our hope is that they’ll be helping more people with their products/services while creating better lifestyles for themselves.
If we help business owners do that by breaking some of the “blogging commandments” and ticking off some blogging purists… oh well. I don’t know of any purists who have gotten over 400 comments in 48 hours and earned nearly $100k providing a quality product to many of those same people (as one of our clients recently did) using what many blogging evangelists would cringe at.
Thanks again for your comments and good luck to you too. The opportunity to vent further on the muddy waters of business blogging has been helpful.
August 24th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
John-Paul
A hat tip to you for your thoughtful, reasoned and courteous response. It’s of course very silly (at best) for anyone to tell business owners that things that make business sense and are legal and ethical are somehow ‘wrong’ because they offend some purist’s sense of what a blog should or should not be or how it should be managed. A blog is just a tool, for heaven’s sake.
I have to admit I haven’t seen many of the sorts of statements you attribute to people giving advice on these matters - maybe I need to get out more or read more widely (but I have a hunch I don’t want to spend a lot of time reading what people say who think and ‘advise’ in that fashion!).
As you indicate, some people probably haven’t worked out that if business isn’t making a profit or heading that way, it’s either a hobby or a dangerous indulgence. I actually remember not so very long ago (say ten years) when some people said it was wrong and dangerous to use the Internet for commercial purposes.
Clearly, you and I are not so far apart as I may have thought.
Des
August 24th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Oh, my pleasure Des. I knew when I took a look at your site that we were pretty close to being on the same page.
Plus, you had a good point that there were no specific examples of what I was mentioning in Filter #4.
Excellent point comparison with the Internet 15-years ago too. Time flies so quickly I had forgotten all about the passionate Internet evangelists of the early 1990’s.
Aloha!
JP
September 27th, 2006 at 6:50 am
Well I’m a business owner and blogger. For me blogging is a strategy I’m using to help the rest of my business community, position myself as an expert and build content for a book - no probably not about blogging.
I have no issue at all with how blogs are used to help people - after all readers can vote with their feet can’t they?
Jim