Why Your Business Should Blog

I talk a lot about how times, they are a changin'. It's inevitable that we will not be able to reach customers in the ways we did in the past. To successfully grow any business, you have to be open to change. Customers adapt faster than businesses, and that's the downfall of many companies. It's a tiresome race, always trying to find the new way to market before the consumer discovers it, but it's a necessary evil.

Blogs are the future. Now, if your idea of blogs is someone's journal about what they ate that day, that may have been true in 2000, but it's not true now. But you know that because you're reading this. Blogs are meant to inform. Rather than buy a set of encyclopedias from a door-to-door salesman, you can have any type of information you seek with a few clicks of a button, and much of it is on blogs. Consumers like free information. Provide that to them, and their sales will follow.

Think about the places you get free information. A newsletter, direct mail, television - whatever the source, chances are there is a company who sells things behind it. And if you know this, and appreciate the information you are given, you are more likely to buy from that company than its competitor. Blogs are no different. I write about marketing because it's what I love. I would probably blog about it anyway, but I also run a marketing and PR firm. While I'm of course not pushing anything on you, it is my hope that if you need marketing one day, you'll think of the woman who writes such useful articles on Marketing 2.0.

Consumers are in a hurry. Blogs provide easy access to information that people can quickly digest. People don't even sit down to read the newspaper any more, so it's important to get readers' attention quickly, offer what they're looking for, and let them go on with their lives. But be assured that somewhere in the back of their minds, they know where that information came from. If you provide an RSS, it's even more convenient for them, since they have to do virtually nothing to get your updates.