Business and Blogging

8 Answers to the Question: Why do you bother?

by Des Walsh on August 28th, 2007

Guest blogger Andrew Garrett provides eight good reasons for blogging as part of your business.

From the outside, spending valuable business time writing a blog looks like you’re wasting time.

From the inside, it’s hard work, but can still feel a little disconnected from your day to day operations.

The value we get from weblogging is hard to quantify in ways that make sense to accountants and financial planners. That doesn’t mean that the value isn’t there, just that it’s a little harder to identify.

If you’re doing it right, you’re helping your business in a number of ways:

1. Growth by Networking: We all know the value of networking for our business - with blogging, you can network more broadly than you’d ever find time (or airfares) to do without it. On any regular day, in the course of business, I deal with people in Finland, The Netherlands, USA, the UK and probably Australia - none of whom I’d be dealing with at all, if not for the connections made because of weblogs. OK, sure, I’m probably an extreme case in that regard - but that doesn’t mean that you can’t realise similar benefits from your Business Blog. No matter what business you’re in, every additional contact you make has possible business benefits - so make plenty. You never know where that next great idea, sale or supplier is going to come from.
2. Clearer Thought: I find I often write as part of the process of sorting something out in my own mind. Some of the time these posts don’t get posted - after I’ve thought them through, there’s no real value to be had in sharing them, or they’re irrelevant to my blog’s target audience. But even when I end up not posting, I come away with a clearer idea on the subject, feeling more solid and more assured in my understanding. Since the majority of my consulting business is based on me selling my knowledge, clarity of knowledge is important - to me, my clients, and my business.
3. A Human Face: It’s easy for business to be too business-like, to be impersonal and cold. Blogging puts you in front of your potential customers, lets you be who you are, lets the relationship you hope to build get started. Being human doesn’t have to mean being unprofessional, just showing a bit of the real you, letting your metaphorical hair down, loosening your tie a bit.
4. More Visibly Unique: Blogging gives you a great platform to tell stories - to share your successes, your ideas, all those things that differentiate you from your competitors, give your clients a reason to come to you rather than someone else. If you’re in a visual industry (photography, for example, or graphic design), a weblog gives you a chance to show off your latest work.
5. Open Doors: Obviously, if you’re writing a blog well it’s easier for people to understand you, where you’re coming from, and to ‘get’ your business. What’s less obvious is that by providing a human face for your company, you’re making it easier for people to talk to you, and once you get them talking, then you’re already half way towards turning a reader into a client.
6. Publicity: This is the obvious one, building buzz, talking to the market, getting your name out there, being in the public eye, exercising some control over your image. Not only that, but if you blog on the same domain as your business website, you’ll improve the find-ability of your main site in most major search engines. Search engines value inbound links and regular updates - a well read blog should generate plenty of the first, and almost has to have the second. Depending on circumstances, you may be also able to leverage your writing experience on your blog into ‘advertorial’ content in your local newspaper.
7. Efficiency: Say it once, take the time to say it right. Especially if you’re in a consulting business, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by having a lot of things already said (and said well) on your weblog. More than once I’ve copied and pasted information from my weblog into emails to clients - meaning I don’t have to figure out how best to say what I want to say every time. Often, blog posts come to me from client emails - if one of my clients is having problems with something, it’s probably a fair indication that someone else out there is too - blogging about it helps me understand the problem space, and could help someone out.
8. Variety: This is a little less tangible, but for me, a patch of blogging in my day breaks the day up, spices things up a little, and revitalises me for the rest of the things I have to do. The more variety I have in my life, the more I can get done.

My blogging time and my business time aren’t separate - they work together. I learn from both, and both benefit from my learning. By working business and blog together, I turn readers into clients, and clients into readers. That sounds like value to me.

(Photo: Tungsten Keyboard 1, by Bouzz)

Andrew is a photographer, freelance systems administrator, and a weblog consultant who gets bored far too easily to only do one job at a time, and can normally be found at his weblog.

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POSTED IN: Blogging, Branding, General