4 Ways My Blogs Help My Business

Chris Brogan, an extremely entertaining speaker at SOBCon08 in Chicago, asks How Does Your Blog Relate To Your Business? Since there were already 39 comments when I found his blog, I thought I’d give my answer here.

Answer: My blogs are one of my primary marketing tools for my business.

Through my blogs, and search engines, I seek to find new prospective customers for my various business products and services.

I don’t do any offline marketing (unless you count giving out business cards). So everything I do for my business is online.

And after almost two years of blogging, and learning about marketing online, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising and now, ecommerce best practices, I’ve found blogging to be one of the most cost effective (cheap) ways to help prospective customers to “know, like and trust” me …

Most business people want some kind of return on investment bottom-line figure, but it’s hard to put a number to what blogging does for my business. I do believe that if I stopped blogging, my business would not grow as fast …

Here’s four ways blogging helps my business:

1. Blogging puts a face to my business — I think people are more comfortable purchasing from someone they actually know, in some virtual way. Brian is a testament of this. His customers follow him almost like a fan club. And I think they buy because they like and trust him.
2. Blogging helps new customers find me, or vice versa — I’m thinking more in terms of finding new customers through the search engines here.
3. Blogging demonstrates my expertise in my business field — My hope is by blogging things like this post, those who have been hanging around my blog, but never bought from me or communicated with me, also see that I know what I’m talking about.
4. Blogging is my way of educational marketing — I try to be a practical blog writer and give readers something they can use in their businesses. I enjoy teaching through blogging. And my goal is to teach people how to use my products and services in a way that’s valuable to them even if they don’t buy from me though.