Business and Blogging

Why a Business Blog? Here Are 5 Good Reasons

by Des Walsh on April 19th, 2007

As more and more businesses establish blogs and as the mainstream media carry articles about business blogs, it is becoming much less of a challenge for me to help business owners understand why a blog might be good for their business.

But one issue that I find comes up a lot is that of finding the time. This is expressed in various ways: “where will I find the time?”, “I simply don’t have any spare time”, “how much time would I have to allocate?”.

This is in part at least a question about value and prioritizing. In other words, is this blogging caper going to be significant enough for my business that it’s worth my while to give it enough priority to get it done?

So it helps to have some reasons for blogging from a front line practitioner, so to speak, a business owner in a small business where there is a not a lot of spare time, if any.

Which is why I was pleased today to be alerted to a list of five reasons for blogging, from a person in the wine industry.

The wine industry is one where, in my observation, people work very hard, with a lot of physical work, and do not have a lot of time to sit around. Now there may be wineries where people spend a lot of time sitting around big tables with lots of eating and drinking the day away, as they seem to do in any movie set in a winery, but I suspect those days are few and far between in the life of a working winery. And I have put some serious time and effort into visiting wineries over the years :)

So I suggest that some reasons for blogging, from a winery owner, could be useful for the consideration, not just of others in the wine business, but for time-strapped business owners generally.

On to the five reasons. In one of those meme-generating, tagging exercises (as in “tag, you’re it”), some bloggers have been prompting one another to declare the five reasons why they blog. The one that caught my eye this morning on zipping through my Google Alerts, was from Mary Baker of the Dover Canyon Winery (Paso Robles, California) blog.

The whole post is not to be missed, but in summary her five reasons for blogging are:

1. I started the blog as a way to announce winery news, generate excitement about upcoming releases, and write about harvest and vineyard activities.

2. The blog connects us with a whole community of people interested in wine that would not otherwise know about us.

3. It’s a much more personal interface than emails.

4. The exercise of writing short pieces has awakened me to a whole universe of potential stories.

5. The blog itself has become an adventure.

Each of these is explained and I haven’t included the explanations because the whole post should be read. But each of the five reasons is interesting and each is worth a whole blog post or three, in my opinion. And there are in fact more than five. Under “other reasons I blog”, one I liked particularly is:

I like to write about our wine region and its people, so visitors can see my fellow vintners, our soils, our passion, through my eyes.

That’s a great principle to apply. Sometimes people worry that they might not have enough to write about in terms of their own business and I urge them to think about writing about their industry, their geographical region or location, and especially what excites them or gives them pleasure about any or all of those.

For those who like to know about the return on investment from blogging, there is an interesting observation in the post:

The blog has become far more important, in terms of marketing and outreach, than our website.

Why I find that observation particularly interesting is that some people are anxious to have their blog look just like their website, which means in practice that they usually don’t start blogging for some time after they decide they want a blog. But what Mary Baker has done is to use a Typepad blog with a template that does not clash with the website design but is not the same. That would have meant she could have started blogging within ten to fifteen minutes of making the decision. And getting started is, in my experience of people “thinking about blogging”, at least half the challenge (the other half is keeping going!).

As the post is part of a tagging meme, you can link immediately to others and their reasons, from Mary’s post.

Here is the tree for the whole meme/tagging exercise: http://www.soloseo.com/why-blog-meme.html

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