• The businessman who could benefit most from your blogging skills doesn’t know how to use an RSS reader.
• The company owner who needs SEO got his website on a whim as a favor to a friend.
• The best way to communicate with your clients is a blog, but none of them read them.

The biggest problem with the internet today?

The people who need it don’t have it, and most people who have it don’t know what it can do.

So perhaps a blog isn’t the best way to communicate with the mostly newbie market. Our clients and prospectives, for the most part, don’t read blogs. So why write one?

Because they will soon. The market for online services isn’t just growing, it’s growing UP. And it pays to be first.

18-year-old kids who learned HTML from MySpace, or 23-year-olds who can type 60 words a minute from instant messaging for 4 hours a day during their teen years will become the 40-year-old entrepreneurs you know today.

Many people don’t think of it like this, something I’m guilty of. They think of their market as it exists now, and consequently have a really hard time seeing their individual clients turning themselves into tech-heads.

They probably never will change, but their replacements will be very different. And they’ll expect you to be connected to the internet, and have a website that communicates what you do effectively.

Do you have one?

Selling the Show

Even for a professional writer like me, I don’t think of this blog as giving away my writing for nothing. While the internet destroys business model after business model, the smartest musicians live by the axiom “give away the music, sell the show.” I think the same can be said for company blogging.

You can read what I write here and wonder why you’re not paying to read it. After all, these are really the greatest marketing ideas of our generation (*smile*) why should I give them to you for free? Three reasons, really:

1. So you can see the quality of ideas I have.
2. So you can see how well I write.
3. So you can envision me writing specifically for you.

Number 3 is the point of everything. Blogging puts your ideas out there and if they’re great enough, a potential customer envisions having you implement those ideas specifically for her. By giving away some of the “music” (my writing and ideas) I can sell the “show” (personal writing for your company).

Others do this too. Seth releases videos of his speeches. Jason Mraz has a whole concert on YouTube. Is this effective marketing? How do you feel after watching them? Enlightened and entertained, sure, but satisfied?

Not me. I want more.

I want to sit in the crowd and laugh along with everyone at Seth’s jokes. I want to sit in the front row of the coffeehouse and get goosebumps at Jason Mraz when he hits a high note. I want to be there.

An effective blog works the same way. You give people a taste of what you do, and if you communicate it well enough they’ll want you to do it specifically for them. They want the personal experience.

And they’ll pay you give it to them.

Blogging Gives You Personal Two-Way Communication with Customers

Like I was saying in my previous post, picking the most talented firm with the best reputation is only half the battle for your clients. They need to know that working with you will be a smooth and painless process, that’s why the most successful businesspeople build personal trust first, then leverage it into long-term business relationships.

Chambers of commerce know this. After-hours mixers exist to promote personal relationships between members.  At VQC we network a lot, and we meet most of our non-referral business personally first, then turn move on to a business relationship.

People do business with people they trust, and trust is most easily won through personal interaction.

Online it’s no different. From the beginning, the internet has been so successful because it connects people.

The first stage of online marketing used About Us pages and employee profiles to “get to know” the company. But it’s tough to get to know someone through a little photo and reading that they enjoy cars.

Blogs serve as the next step in online customer interaction. Your customers get a direct line into your ideas coupled with a personal flavor. A well-written blog will read like one side of a conversation between friends.

Tech-savvy plastic surgeons have this down to a T. Their clientèle needs to trust their doctor on a personal level to feel comfortable. The doctors, in turn, make sure their big smiling faces are all over their marketing materials. If you’ve driven on 581 East recently, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Or look at this site.

A blog post with the author’s face next to it (coming soon to this blog!) shows off industry knowledge while reading like an email from a friend.

The ability to participate in the conversation through the comments is also much more engaging than simple reading. So it can be more than one side of a conversation with a friend.  Potential clients can interact with you personally and, perhaps more importantly, with each other.

People appreciate connecting with other people. More than static reading, online readers today would rather

• Talk (or listen) to someone knowledgeable
• Share stories with a group in a similar situation
• Participate in the conversation

Blogs interact with readers, which (if done correctly) turns them into customers.

In the last installment of this series, I’ll wrap up and tell you the most important thing blogging does for your business.

I’ve mentioned some of these things in passing a couple times before, but I think it’s high time for a few posts detailing exactly why blogging is so important for any business.

I have to give credit to Frank from A Personnel Connection for prompting this series. We met at our mixer on Wednesday. I mentioned that I’m the blogger for VQC and we got to talking about what blogging can do for business.

I found myself “pitching” company blogging in person, on the fly, for the first time. It’s amazing what I said, because I had never needed to put the benefits of what I do into a short, concise explanation before. (Try it, it’s exhilarating.)

But I did, and now I’ll share what I said with you. In my mind, blogging is the best (and ironically most inexpensive) way to communicate with your customers. Here’s the first reason your business needs a blog:

Blogging Establishes You as an Expert in Your Field.

No one does business with someone they don’t trust.

Whenever you enter into a contract and need the other party to follow through you’re putting yourself out on a limb. It’s a pretty big risk for a business to pay you a lot of money to do a task for them. Before anything is signed or any money changes hands, both parties must be absolutely certain the other will be trustworthy.

So how does this typically work? How do the majority of people pick someone to do business with?

Research.

If your say you’re an expert in your field, your future client can verify that extremely easily if you have a blog. Your portfolio and previous contracts are helpful indicators, yes, but a blog gives the client a direct line into your thoughts.

She has access to different kind of information to help her make an informed decision about your expertise.

Showing that you know your stuff is different from simply saying you do, and a blog is the best way to communicate your expertise. Everyone says they’re the best, or the premier, or what have you, but are your competitors actually showing through their writing that they know their industry inside out?

Now is your chance to do exactly that. Think about it: would you choose a company with no visible marketing experience to handle a very important channel of your marketing (like a website) over one with a blog that gives you marketing insight regularly?

The great blog will definitely factor in the decision.

But in the end the decision to do business with a company is about much more than professional trust and an predicting a favorable outcome. I’ll talk about that second kind of trust in the next installment in the series.