We don't use our blog as a marketing tool (for either of our businesses), because one must assume a fairly moderate voice. However, this is an interesting development, no doubt. Much more personal than email marketing, or direct mail.
WSJ.com - Enterprise - Blog as a business tool:
The blog as business tool has arrived.Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping has become an important supplement to a business's online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal level -- and keep them visiting a company's Web site regularly.
...While any size company can use such a strategy, small businesses may benefit most: Blogs offer little-known small businesses name recognition, and the chance to boost traffic well beyond what they'd get if they were simply offering goods and services for sale.
“It's a new way of communicating, rather than marketing,” says Charlene Lee, an analyst at Forrester Research. Like other forms of publishing, blogs attract the largest audiences when they avoid overt commercialism and deliver compelling and credible content, Ms. Lee says.
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In a similar vein, blogs with character are seen as more effective than some more traditional online-marketing strategies, such as static, brochurelike Web sites and electronic newsletters that may get blocked by spam filters. ...Starting a blog can reap big increases in Web site visitors within months, thanks largely to search engines' enthusiasm for the medium. Quality blogs tend to rise higher on search-results pages because other Web sites link to them. Engines like Google consider those links virtual popularity votes and use them to help determine display order. Like many other companies, GreenCine also extends its reach to audiences beyond its own site by offering its blog content for syndication on other sites using a popular new technology called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. GreenCine syndicates itself to the online news site Alternet and independent-film blog indieWIRE. Although financial rewards can be hard to measure, many small-business owners also use blogs to establish reputations as authorities in their fields or to provide how-to advice. For instance, Tom Wark, owner of his own wine-industry public-relations firm, Wark Communications, in Glen Ellen, Calif., has a blog in which he comments on a wide variety of wine-related subjects. Mr. Wark says since he started his blog in November, its traffic has grown steadily to between 200 and 300 visitors a day, and traffic to his standard Web site has doubled. Though he can't measure the financial benefit, he gets a lot of e-mail from readers in the trade and serious wine enthusiasts and says he has pitched more potential clients in the past three months than he has in the past year and a half. In Salt Lake City, muscle-car restorer David C. Atkin, owner of Red Line Performance & Restoration and a self-described “hot rod,” keeps a blog about refurbishing old Corvettes, Mustangs and Camaros. Mr. Atkin started his blog about three months ago and is now getting around 300 visitors a day -- double the traffic to his Web site. It hasn't brought him any clients yet, he says, but over time he thinks it might bring one or two sales a year, which would be a lot in his world where one job can bring in $40,000 to $50,000. .... To build an audience, blogs don't have to be edgy, provocative or funny, says blog coach Griff Wigley, of Wigley and Associates, Northfield, Minn., who has helped several dozen small companies start online journals. But they do have to be authentic and provide useful information. The personal touch helps build relationships with customers, something particularly important to small companies catering to local communities. The personal style blogs require may seem less believable, however, if it's seen coming from a large corporation. “If you slip into PR lingo, Mr. Wigley says, ”you will lose your visitors. They will know it's not really you.“ Rick E. Bruner, research manager and resident blog expert at the New York online advertising company DoubleClick Inc., says: ”Personality is part of what keeps people coming back. That doesn't have to be reckless.“ Mr. Bruner, who writes his own blog about using blogs in business, recommends that companies choose bloggers with care. The most popular of five blogs on yogurt maker Stoneyfield Farms' Web site, ”The Bovine Bugle,“ chronicles daily life on the Howmars family farm in Franklin, Vt., one of the company's organic milk suppliers. Owner Jonathan Gates writes about breaking ice in the heifers' drinking-water tanks, cows giving birth and vaccinating calves, and posts pictures to go with his reports. ”He doesn't even talk about Stoneyfield, and I couldn't care less if he does,“ says CEO Gary Hirshberg, who decided to launch several blogs after getting involved with Howard Dean's presidential campaign last year and seeing how effectively they built relationships and loyalty. ”Blogging is one of a wide range of ways that we can connect with people [and] strengthen what I call our handshake with the consumer,“ he says, while supporting longtime Stoneyfield causes like organic and family farming, environmentalism and good nutrition. Mr. Hirshberg says he doesn't know whether the blogs are helping sales at his 245-employee company. But despite a small marketing budget, revenue has grown an average of 23% a year for 11 years and Stoneyfield has become the No. 3 yogurt brand after Groupe Danone's Danon and General Mills Inc.'s Yoplait. He credits a willingness to do ”unusual things.“ Communication through a blog is ”as intimate and personal as somebody sitting in your kitchen,“ Mr. Hirshberg says. ”It's a great privilege to be able to have that kind of dialogue.“
"Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project."??
so there are 4 people reading, on average, for each blog writer?
haha...thats weak