Someone recently asked me if I thought it was a good idea, for them to start writing a business blog. Whilst you may imagine my answer would automatically be a resounding ‘yes’, it wasn’t!
I explained that in my experience, blogging is only a worthwhile commercial investment if you invest in it appropriately for what you want to achieve. For a blog to succeed, we need to start off by understanding the incredible volume of competition and noise out there.
Competition and noise
At the time of writing this, on WordPress.com alone there are over 50 million blogs with 500 thousand new posts published every day. That’s just on one version, of one blogging platform. There are many millions more blogs out there, like this one, which are self-hosted WordPress blogs. Then, there are over 100 million more people blogging across platforms like; Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad and Posterous etc.
To attempt to cut through all that blogging activity and the billions of pages of content out there, with a blog that even the blog’s owner isn’t committed to, is unrealistic at best.
The opportunity
Thankfully, there is an amazing opportunity if you are prepared to invest the time, energy, creativity and money (yes money) required, in order to build a commercially valuable blog.
We need to start though, with a commitment to take blogging seriously and invest in it, as we would with any business opportunity. Anything else is a waste of time.
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Great post Jim. These stats are a trifle intimidating, however the strong survive, so we keep trucking on
Good point, Jim. The main reasons I tell clients to blog are: A. Show potential clients the scope of their own work and thinking; B. Build trust with prospects through intelligent, measured and prudent exposition of what their company is “about” and does; C. Builds a body of work that highlights their expertise.
The folks who want to make a living blogging are often putting cart before horse – they have nothing close to a substantial reputation in their field, and they rarely research and write all day, every day long enough to make it a success. Many are doomed simply because they’re bad writers.
In the end, if you have a loyal audience of 100 people with some influence, that can be quite valuable. The link is to a SlideShare presentation I gave to the local American Advertising Federation chapter. Pass it along if it will help anyone. Cheers!!
http://www.slideshare.net/frankygee3/business-blogging-best-practices-13352168
With 50 million blogs on WordPress, it’s incredible that anyone bothers to create one at all! Our new business agency blog at http://spongenb.wordpress.com generates few hits, but usually quite valuable interactions. I don’t update it as often as I should because running our small business comes first. We’ve found it generates the most leads when we write the least selfish content. The minute we try to promote ourselves directly, it tends to reduce the number of times the phone rings.
Great Article, Blogging seems to be the best way to make an online income… I know it has worked for me..
Thank You
Wow! This information woke me up! I knew there were thousands and thousands of blogs – but millions and millions ? That crazy. I am trying to increase my sales by selling information that people need and want and is worth every penny is worth every penny to them. Unfortunately, competing with me is a bunch of worthless regurgitated
information.
Once again a great post Jim, this post has left a great impact on me
I enjoyed your posts. It is interesting to see the use of blogging as a valuable and profitable tool in marketing and business. I am taking a class on marketing and was tasked to find various sites and I enjoyed what you had to share.