During the past 2 weeks when I have been talking to folks about using blogs as a marketing tool, I have hearing a lot of misconceptions about blogging in the small business arena. I’d like to address some of the more common misconceptions that I run into in my next few posts.
I have run into several business owners who have been told (or read) that they need to post 4 or 5 times a day in order to have an "effective" blog. I think this misconception stems from the difference between "professional" bloggers and small business bloggers. By professional bloggers, I mean people who are using their blog to generate all or a significant portion of their income. In general, these folks are making money by selling advertising on their sites. So the goal is to draw as much traffic as possible to their blogs so more people click on the ads on their sites which leads to more income. The more these folks post, the more likely they are to draw in the traffic.
Small business owners, on the other hand, generally use blogs as a way to demonstrate their expertise in a particular subject or industry. Blogs are also a good way for them to connect with their customers and prospects to help build the Know, Like, and Trust components of their relationships that will hopefully lead to sales and referrals. In this environment, I believe it is more important to post relevant, quality content that your audience is interested in and to do so on a consistent basis than it is to try focus on a certain number of posts per day.
Most of the small business owners I talk to don’t have time to post 4 or 5 times a day, so they decide not to post at all. This is like saying "I don’t have time to talk to my customers 4 or 5 times a day, so I will no longer talk to them at all".
Relevance, consistency, and the quality of your content trump volume when it comes to using a blog as a small business marketing tool. But don’t take my word for it, ask your customers.
