‘We envision a day in the near future when companies that don’t blog will be held suspect to some degree, with people wondering whether those companies have something to hide or whether the owners are worried about what the people who work for them have to say’

- Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Naked  Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers

Blogging for Business. Fish where the fish are. Photo Credit: Xalamay http://www.flickr.com/photos/xalamay/

I was asked recently about the value to business of blogging. In this era of interactive technology enabled by Web 2.0, blogs or web logs have become increasingly popular.  The benefits are many.  Here are just three:

Customers eMarketer reports that in 2009,  96.6 million US Internet users, representing 48.5% of the population, read a blog at least once per month. In 2013, it is anticipated that this number will grow to 128.2 million people, or 58% of all US users.

The number of bloggers is also rising. In 2009, 27.9 million US Internet users have a blog they update at least once per month, representing 14% of the Internet population. By 2013, 37.6 million will update their blogs at least monthly.

With so many people reading or actually writing blogs – it is likely your customers are too.

In a recent article, inbound marketing software company,  HubSpot customers revealed ‘that businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than those who don’t.’

Communication A blog provides the means to listen to and engage with your customers. A business can test ideas, undertake research or gather opinions about its product/service. Marketer and author David Meerman Scott credits his best selling book ‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR’ (now in its second edition) as a result of a single blog post and the refinement of ideas following feedback received via his blog.

Search Engines Love Blogs Regular blogs provide fresh  content for your website which helps its ranking in search engines.

I’ll leave the last word on blogging to Seth Godin, who writes the world’s most popular marketing blog and Tom Peters: Management Consultant, Writer, Lecturer  and  co-author of the seminal ‘In Search of Excellence’  in a clip we posted last year.    So Get Blogging!

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