Why Blog?

VisionPace asks the primary question.
Let us examine Doug Bliss' answers...

"Why Blog? From a business perspective blogs are no different from marketing channels like video, print, audio or presentations. They all deliver results of varying kind. The kind you can expect from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with target groups important to you. Below are a few blogging advantages we hope to benefit from."

Customer Relationships
"In a forum where your main objective is not to directly sell, you'll have a more personal relationship between you and your customers. Blogs are a fast way to engage customers' discussions, provide tips and insights or receive feedback."

Some of your readers will be come customers. But not just ordinary customers. Knowledgable and friendly customers. Customers who may actually behave like a sales or marketing department, as they may alert their network of associates, weak and strong ties, all of whom may, at least, speak of you positively, but some of whom will become veritable salespeople who, themselves, are strong and loyal customers.

Media Relations
"It's every PR-consultants dream to create a channel where media regularly check what you have to say, instead of media just being passive - sometimes indifferent - recipients of press releases."

Indeed. Especially since the blog arena is where so much of the best news is to be found. You needen't even lick a stamp. Just point you browser to be right spots, and go!

Recruiting
"If you establish your company as a thought leader, people in your business will pay attention. They'll read and discuss what you have to say. Chances are good they will see you as an attractive employer."

One's blog becomes one's portfolio that one pieces together one blogpost at a time, and over time. Not rifled together in a frantic afternoon.

Testing Ideas or Concepts
"A blog is informal. It's part of a conversation where people (often) can comment, and the blog can provide you with a measure of value. Publish an idea and see if it generates interest. Does anyone link to you? What do they say?"

Some people say that blog comments, themselves, are blogs. And I tend to agree. I have have seen blog comments that were far better than the blogpost to which it referred. Indeed, some my very best writing has been written in comment windows.
One should always welcome, nay, inspire comments, and then be sure to attend to them. The benefits of a healthy comment world ripple in ways we have yet to discover. Hey! Who's at the door...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
"Google and other search engines reward sites that are updated often, that link to other sites and most importantly, that has many inbound links. Start a blog at your regular site and your ranking will receive a boost."

The higher your ranking, the higher you are on Google. You are high on Google, aren't you? Hmm. Not a bad ad:

I'm HIGH on Google!

Blog Entries
"Don't be as concerned with the length or style of your entry. Keep the focus on sharing your thoughts and opinions on a particular subject. That's what readers are most interested in."

Knowledge, facts and wisdom might be nice too. No didacticism though. And pleeeease don't be calumnious, petulant or insane. At least not at the same time.

(Thanks to BloggingBusiness for the link.)

Make way blogging, podcasting is here!

Taipei Times - archives

excerpt...
If you've never heard of a podcast, here's a brief description. The concept was developed last summer when Adam Curry, 41, a former VJ for MTV and an inveterate tech tinkerer, became intrigued with the idea of freeing Internet radio and audio blogs from his computer and putting them on the capacious drive of his Apple iPod.

He called the result podcasting, named after the Apple iPod that is often at the center of the system.

The basic idea is instead of listening to radio over the airwaves, you download the radio shows you want from the Internet onto your iPod and listen to them when you want.

That may not seem such a revolutionary idea, except for the fact that the wonders of digital technology make it easy for anyone who wants to record his own radio show to upload them to various sites that then use syndication feeds to deliver the radio segments directly to listeners' MP3 players.
...
"Podcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it," noted Linux guru Doc Searls when he discovered podcasting way back in September.

"It is totally going to kill the business model of radio," Curry said. He believes that mainstream media and advertising companies are rapidly losing the ability to reach their audiences as the decline of network television, the rise of the Internet and the fragmentation of the media make the models that have existed for the last 50 years rapidly obsolete.
...
But Dave Winer, who teamed with Curry to launch the first podcasts and is also the writer of the longest-running blog on the net, Scripting News, is more sanguine and warns against expecting an overnight revolution.

"We're the sources, the people doing stuff, and podcasting is a way to tell people who care what we're doing," Winer told the BBC last week.

Search Industry Maturing

Search Industry Maturing
"The days of a website being a picture that contained a thousand words are long over. Today's successful websites can be found using a multiple number of search-tools such as; image search, local search, video search, audio search and organic search. A successful search-campaign also involves making sure a reference to the site is virtually forced on users through contextual advertising programs such as Overture and AdWords. The establishment of a corporate blog for clients is the last step of a highly sophisticated search marketing campaign. By offering better technologies, search engines offer marketers much larger tracts of real estate to work from. User adoption of many of these technologies pushes search marketers to figure out how to best use them as well. "