Part three of a five-part series –The Dangers of Pursuing the Wrong Blog Strategy in Your Small Business

In today’s click-and-mortar marketplace, you have to think about your market’s conversations, understand its influences and needs in real time, and formulate a communication strategy in which to get connected.

If you think you will join the World Live Web (aka: the blogosphere) with a hit-and-run marketing piece — your message will be dead in the water before you will ever make a sale. You must be thoughtful and committed to building relationships. Today’s marketplace demands it!

To create a successful business blogging strategy (and over-all marketing plan) you have to understand that you don’t control the message entirely. You control levels of influence but consumers have the ultimate choice. Deliver value and people will choose your content and your products.

Indexing, updates, and information

There are live search directories that patrol the World Live Web for all the live content updates and they index them. This indexing is so fast, so efficient, and so viral that mainstream search-engines like Google and Yahoo vigorously search the World Live Web for content.

Business blogs provide a much broader reach for your content because of live-content updates. Never before has your content been able to reach so many faraway places. The major search engines are important; however, your content can now get listed on blog and RSS search directories and show up in search results that were never before available.

Everything is designed to promote and multiply information quickly.

Social networking and word of mouth marketing

Blogs as participatory-journalism tools or citizen-media tools (blogs are called by several cool buzz phrases that capture the essence of what they do) have outflanked and outranked mainstream media. Businesses must now speak to bloggers along with using regular media if they want to be effective.

Marketers must be conversational in their messaging and must be interested in building relationships in order to recognize new revenues. Communication is two-way, peer-to-peer, instant flow, in real time. Information no longer flows from the top down but multilaterally through informal and viral Web-based discussions.

According to a Pew Internet study released in Nov-Dec 2004, of 120-million adult Internet users, seven percent or eight million have created blogs. And 27 percent of Internet users say they read blogs, up from 17 percent since the last survey in February 2004. This number represents 32-million Americans who are reading blogs!

Additionally, the PEW Internet study revealed that 12 percent of Internet users post material or comments on other blogs. That’s 14-million people having conversations using blogs. And, five percent or six-million Internet users say they use RSS to get news and information.

Considering these (most recent) stats are already more than six months old, the numbers are huge. The numbers stand despite the negative comments from naysayers who still don’t get it.

All of this represents a simultaneous challenge and opportunity for business owners (and business bloggers) to reach new markets and communicate more effectively within current markets. Are you preparing yourself to win in the 21st Century marketplace with the right business blogging strategy?

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — Marketing With Business Blogs.

He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honoulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club.


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