Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Going against the grain here - in my opinion there is a lot of over-hyping the use of blogs because, well, it's a big buzzword right now. Most successes in the blog realm are not commercial, per se, and the bigger commercial successes are with companies/entities that:

1. had a large user base in place
2. the company had the resources to dedicate one or more people to manage the blog and the finances to promote it well
3. their product and/or target audience was a logical fit for the one-to-one, personal nature of a blog, as in their target audience craves instant information or very personal contact.

That said, I would carefully analyze the blog route for yourself, not based on the hype that seems so prevelant these days. As for your questions about blogs, here's my response:

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1. Pros and Cons - The pros are intimate, one-to-one style contact with your visitors, and a very personal touch.
The cons are that if your blog content is not extremely fresh, which means new, relevant postings every three days or less, you will have a very difficult time getting repeat visitors OR interested customers. If people come to your blog and see that the last posting was from December 2002, why would they bother? Are you even still in business?

Fresh content is the key to successful blogging, but even MORE important useful, meaningful content, and THIS is the main reason I say "blogging for dollars" is over-hyped. Unless you have something meaningful or important to tell your visitors every few days, a blog isn't for you. Here's another way to think of this issue - could your business issue a press release every few days that was worthy of getting published in your local paper? If not, your blog might not be interesting enough to pay off. It's not enough to ramble on with personal musings or talk about your dog Fluffy, the content must be informative, relevant and useful, and in your case it must also serve to sell your service.

Creating fresh, meaningful content that often isn't easy, unless you have someone who can not only dedicate a reasonable amount of time to it, but has good writing and selling skills. Many people hype blogs because they are so easy to set up, but a month later they are fresh out of useful stuff to tell their audience, and the wheels fall off the cart.
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2. Will blogs promote your services - NO. Only you can promote your services, a blog is just a window in which to do this. You will still have to spend considerable time and money attracting visitors and writing material on your blog that effectively sells.

Plus, blogs were designed as communication tools, not selling tools, so it's difficult to set them for business use - processing customers, setting up contact forms for people to fill out, incorporate your own design for branding purposes, or any other aspect of a true commercial web site.
Blogs are best used as a companion to an existing website, using the website as your sales and marketing tool and the blog as a way to get personal with your visitors. As mentioned, no web site or blog will promote your services unless YOU are promoting the blog or web site! You need visitors for it to be considered promotion, and the work involved in promoting a blog is no different than the work promoting a regular, commercial web site.
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3. Risks - The risks are no different than any other commercial web site, so shouldn't be much of a factor. Unless, of course, you are trying to process payments online. In this case, you need a secure web site, not a blog.
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4. Time and Money Investment - Cost for any website can ultimately be broken down into three areas - the costs of building, maintaining and promoting your site. The cost to build a blog is low since there are many free services out there, so I'll focus on promotion and cost of maintainence.

For your blog to be even remotely successful, you need visitors and lots of them. The average rate of conversions online (the number of people who visit vs. those who actually become a paying customer) is around 4% for a well-designed commercial site, but for a blog is probably closer to 1-2%. So if you want 10 new customers per month, you need 500-1,000 visitors. Ultimately you will need to do a lot of promotion to make this thing pay off.
So in short, you will be spending more money on promotion, and spending a LOT more time in writing content for your blog. With a standard commercial site, it is much more acceptable to write your content once and update it every few months.

On the promotion front, here's another issue to consider. 85% of all web traffic comes from search engines. If you don't show up in the top page or two of search results for your industry, you aren't getting visits without paying for them. Google and other search engines don't like blog content because they are so easy to stuff with keywords and irrelevant fluff, all just to get higher ranking. For example, I could create a blog that says Brittany Spears 10,000 times in a bunch of different postings, but is my blog going to be 10,000 times more useful to the visitor? Doubtful, and to avoid these issues many search engines either don't index blog content or penalize it heavily. Therefore, getting search engines to bring your site up in searches will be tougher with a blog, which means you will be spending even more on promotion since you are getting less "natural" visitors.
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Because of all of these factors, I would recommend spending the money to get a nicely designed yet simple web site created by a web professional. This will increase your conversion rates, reduce maintainence time required by you, and provide a much richer platform on which to market your services. If the site is successful at drawing visitors, create a blog and link to it from the main web site to benefit from the direct communication and personal touch blogs give you. But a blog in and of itself is not going to net you more sales in my experience.