The Wall Street Journal published a fairly comprehensive article on reasons why small businesses have taken to blogging: Blog It and They May Come.
The article goes into very nice detail with specific case studies from a variety of industries. For example, the article provides detail about a marketing/copywriting firm that quickly grew its blog readership to more than 150,000 unique visitors a month (from only 100 prior to the blog). Their challenge, then, was to convert visitors to clients, which, by the way, did eventually happen.
Other examples include an online toy retailer, a forensic accounting firm and a London tailor. It's all very good, applicable information on how these diverse firms used a blog to grow their business. I know that reading this article validated our decision to get into the blogosphere :)
The article outlined five different reasons why a small business may consider blogging:
1. Boost traffic to their website
2. Boost new sales
3. Boost search-engine rankings
4. Allow for the sharing of information with customers, plus a blog facilitates customer feedback
5. Replaces the website, hence cutting IT/web costs
RRW's primary reason for creating this blog is probably a mixture of 3 and 4, above. We wanted to create more visibility for our direct marketing consulting practice, and we truly wanted our blog to be a forum where we could share thoughts, ideas and news with current and prospective customers.
Are any of the above reasons why you decided to blog? Do you have any other reasons to share?
2 comments:
Where is "generate awareness" and "establish credibility" (ie, thought leadership) on that list?
I'm surprised to see that you would list #3 as a reason for blogging. "Boosting search engine rankings" seems very different to me than "creating more visibility for the practice."
I can't say whether or not you've succeeded at creating more visibility, but you've certainly succeeded at establishing credibility beyond your existing customer base with the blog.
Yes, absolutely 'generate awareness' and 'establish credibility' should be added to the list. And, I'll also agree that these are closer to what one of RRW's goals was (to create more visibility). I guess moving up in search engine rankings is a symptom or a result of growing that awareness.
And, the blog IS establishing credibility outside of our customer base. I hadn't thought of it that way, but now am proud to do so :)
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