Driving in Maine during the winter (October – June) often requires four-wheel drive; it doubles your chance of finding traction on a wet and slippery road. However, if there’s no pavement to grab, your four wheel drive doesn’t improve your chances of staying on the road. In other words: 4 x 0 = 0.
It’s with this indisputable math that we turn to blogging. I’ve written before about The Three Faces of Blogs, which is the idea that with each blog post you get three distribution channels:
- a new Web page that can be read, linked to by other bloggers, and indexed by the search engines (bringing future readers),
- a newsfeed for real simple syndication, and
- an email feed for the vast majority of humans who wouldn’t know an RSS feed if it slapped ‘em upside the head.
The built-in communication tools of a blog are a great way to leverage your content and reach a wider audience.
By doing some additional marketing/promotion for your blog you can generate amazing results for that single blog post. These include:
- submitting to blog directories,
- pinging news aggregators,
- leaving intelligent, appropriate comments and trackbacks at related blogs, and
- including social bookmarking links like Digg and StumbleUpon.
However, like the slick roads of northern Maine, to see results you need to have some traction. No matter how much work you or your blog developer has put into your blog, no matter how many plugins she may have installed, your blog is ineffective until you regularly generate content that is interesting and compelling to your target audience.
To stick with the automotive metaphor, your content is the fuel that powers that high-performance machine we call a business blog. There’s a lot of ways to fill your blogging tank, but I recommend you start with, "what are my customers and prospects interested in? What are they searching for at Google? What questions will lead them to do business with me?"
When you know the answers to these questions you can start to get some traction, and a return on your investment.
Rich Brooks
Business Blog Consultant
