BLOGthenticity

Bobbie Johnson over at the Guardian talks about bloggers making money from their blogs. It’s an excellent piece about monetising. However, for us bricks and mortar businesses monetising isn’t the name of the game. For us it’s about the cultivation of relationships etc., etc.

I’m still smarting over a referral I found in my stats which tantalisingly spoke of an ‘excellent niche blog example’. I presumed it was about The Tinbasher and headed over to have my ego massaged. It was a comment talking about what a niche blog The Tinbasher was and how they couldn’t quite believe how I wasn’t monetising it.

What on earth did they think I was trying to do? The whole bottom line to having any weapon in your web marketing arsenal is to drive revenue through it. The key thing with regards to the blog is that I’m trying to explain our services and our products in greater detail and show potential customers what type of company they might be dealing with if they so choose. God forbid I should start watching anybody disappear through an affiliate link to earn myself a quick dollar. Affiliate links for me would be the last refuge of the truly desperate - although I do have the one that I put up for a friend who wanted hosting and writing this has reminded me to take it down.

I’ve just been over to Goodbasic and found a splendid post referring to Harold Jache’s real benefits of business blogging.
Harold sees the benefits as thus:

*Using a feed reader (via RSS), saves a lot of time and bookmarking.
* The information I get from bloggers is usually weeks ahead of the mainstream press.Call this competitive intelligence.
* By blogging, I have raised my profile on the web and increased visits to my site by a factor of 1000 in less than one year. This is cheap marketing.
* I use my database of posts when preparing reports, proposals and presentations. It helps to have a searchable system like Drupal.
* Blogging forces me to think and reflect in order to write, so that what was just an idea in my mind becomes more concrete.
* The underlying technology of easy posting and RSS to keep track of things, makes a lot of sense for collaborative learning and collaborative work - two areas of interest for my business.
* Through blogging, I have met a number of business partners.
GoodBasic note: Like us!
* Blogging keeps me in touch with a lot of interesting people and expands my view of the world, providing new ideas for my business.
* When I have a problem, especially a technical one, I post it on my site or someone else’s and usually get an informed answer within 24 hours. It’s like a large performance support system.
* It allows people to get to know my opinions before they engage me as a consultant; saving time and potential frustrations.

All sterling stuff, but I can imagine you might find yourself in a bit of a quandry. On the one hand there are those trying to drive any and every single revenue stream through their blog, which I’ve distinctly poo-pooed. Yet, on the other there’s the real benefits of business blogging, which all sound fantastic, but says nothing about whether it can make you any more money in the process.

This is where I come in quite useful. You see, not only do I fully believe and attempt to practice the real benefits mantra, but I also manage to make money whilst doing it. This afternoon we were sat having a coffee and talking about various jobs we had to do, and talk soon got round to jobs that had come through the websites and how much percentage in terms of yearly turnover the jobs were worth. I know it’s not very scientific, but we’re a small business that knows what the left hand is doing at the same time as the right.

If we’re being conservative, we’ll say there’s been a 10% increase since we incorporated a blog. And, we’ll also say that it costs 10% of that 10% to have me write it, maintain the other websites and pay for hosting etc. And, once we get the next order we’ve been promised, that figure suddenly rises to nearer 40% of annual turnover, but without any increase in cost.

Are we getting this yet?

It’s a very simple equation.

Real Blogging Benefits - Monetising = Revenue

Filed under: Business Blogging, Paul