The Backyard Batting Cage

One of the big questions/concerns people have around business blogging is how much time does it take?

This is a legitimate question because in any economy, whether you’re failing, surviving or thriving, chances are you’re already working more than the 40 hours which was the norm when you were growing up.

Plus, when you were a kid you didn’t realize that cooking, cleaning, transporting to soccer/karate/ballet classes, travel time to and from work, mowing the lawn, fixing the lawnmower/heating/plumbing, reading bed time stories, coaching little league, laundry and fill-in-your-own activity would also count towards all your spent time on the planet. Plus sleeping 8 (hah!) hours a day.

So, how much time should you dedicate to blogging?

Well, I do the marketing, sales & communication for my company; in fact, I’d say that my primary job function is generating inbound leads for flyte. Blogging is one of the best ways to generate leads. I know this because our web marketing blog has the highest conversion rate for referrers at our web site. That means, the people who come to our web site from our blog are the most likely to fill out our contact form, which is the main way we get new business.

In my opinion, as long as you’re not just pumping out crap, you can’t blog enough. The mental shift you need to make is that blogging is marketing; blogging is increasing your online visibility; blogging is sales.

Blogging is customer acquisition, it’s customer support, it’s customer retention.

Blogging is the answer to the question your prospect just asked on Google. If you blogged the answer last week or last month or last year, Google might lead that prospect to your blog.

But, and that is a very big but:

Don’t let the fear that you can’t blog as often as I might suggest stop you from blogging at all. If you can commit to blogging just once a week–500 words or less–at the end of the year you’ll have 52 blog posts that can answer questions posted at Google or Bing, drive qualified traffic to your site/blog, and help convert those prospects into customers.

If you only commit to one blog post every other week, then you’ll still have 26 posts, 26 opportunities at landing new business that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

So what’s keeping you from starting/re-starting your business blog?

Rich Brooks
Small Business Blogging

Photo Credit: Poolie

Tags: Blog, blogging, business blogging, entrepreneur

This entry was posted on Friday, September 10th, 2010 at 6:54 am and is filed under Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Business Philosophy, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Web Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

View the original article here