Why Blog in the First Place?

I had my first “live,” in-person blogging class Wednesday night – and it was a whopping success. The participants were friendly, eager-to-learn and asked lots of great questions.

But one question stood out: Why blog at all? Isn’t this just an indulgent waste of time? Who really cares what you think anyway? Is this “Myspace” for grownups?

I’d like to address that briefly from my perspective as a veteran copywriter.

1. Advertising Saturation. First off, we are living in a hyper-marketing world. New technologies have created a situation in which the average person is bombarded by between 500 and 5,000 sales messages every single day.

More and more, marketers are viewed as SCUM, unwanted guests who shove their way into our personal spaces and whom we want to avoid at all costs. We create strategies for filtering out sales messages – from TiVO screening commercials to spam filters for our computers.

2. Peer to Peer. What this means is that, increasingly, we are turning to peers or friends for our buying advice. If we’re thinking about buying a computer, we ask our friends which is better, not the sales guy at the computer store.

3. Making Friends. Businesses of all types are discovering, therefore, that they have go back to basics if they want to sell anything to people. They have to actually make friends with their prospects first… and only later sell them something. They have to serve their customers by providing them with quality information that they can trust.

4. Starting Conversations. And that is why blogging is increasingly a “must have” tool for all businesses – especially mom and pop operations but also big businesses as well. Blogs are designed to create two-way conversations. They allow readers to post comments on your posts – and you can interact with your prospects and customers.

5. Getting to Know Customers. Blogs allow people in a market niche to tell businesses what they REALLY want… as opposed to what businesses THINK they want. They allow businesses to GET TO KNOW THEIR CUSTOMERS, to make friends with their customers. They allow businesses to test out ideas and concepts in a low-cost way and see what their market thinks about them.

6. Peer to Peer Marketing. Blogs are easy-to-create, inexpensive and easy to modify. That allows small businesses to use technologies – including email newsletters, videos and mass marketing – until recently reserved only to big companies.

Bottomline: So, the bottomline is this. The reason why you should be blogging if you’re in business is that blogging allows you to identify, interact with and serve prospective customers in your market niche.

You can build an online business by dedicating yourself to SERVING a particular market niche – whether that niche is professional crocket players or knitters or Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts.

You become a preeminent CUSTOMER of your own niche. You buy all the products that people want to sell to your prospects – and then you tell your prospects what are valuable and what are crap.

Do that… be a true and loyal friend to your market… and then, when it comes time to sell your market something, they will trust you and buy from you. You’ll have built up enough street “cred” so that your market will know you know what you’re talking about.

That’s why you should start blogging. Identify a market you want to be in. Step up and become a “servant leader” in your niche. And then start selling people what they really need and want.

P.S. If you haven’t started a blog yet, you can set up a free blog in under 2 minutes by viewing my introductory video here. If you’d like to get your own domain name and start a blog for business, you can start here.