Is Your Blog Enough for Doing Business?

Mar 23, 2007

Or should it be just a side-kick of your main business website? It depends on how you focus your blog. There are some people doing decent business through their blogs, for instance, blogs that publish content solely to earn ad-revenue. Bloggers like Darren Rowse and Steve Pavlina are known to be making great money off their blogs and blogging is their full-time occupation. But I’m not talking about such blogs. I’m talking about a blog like mine.

By profession I’m a content writer and I have a business website from where I get regular work. Off late, I’ve started receiving business queries from this blog too. They are not many, but considering the miniscule amount of traffic I get here, and compared to the miniscule traffic I get on my business website, it is worth noticing. In March so far I’ve received 4 business queries from ContentBlog.net and 2 of them resulted in paying assignments. Now this is when on an average I get 40-100 visitors (including unique and repeat) daily, depending on how often I post and how often my links appear on other websites due to people linking to my posts or I leaving comments.

Keeping the other factors constant (the kind of visitors I get) what if I received say, 2000 visitors per day? I think certainly there will be more work, again, depending on how I promote my blog and from where I get the traffic. So should I drop my website and completely focus on my blog? Even if work doesn’t increase proportionately with the traffic, I can always put ads here :-).

Not many people understand blogs yet. Blogs have a particular format and they, most of the time, organize content in a linear fashion. Even the language is different; it doesn’t need to be, but it is. Compared to a blog, a website, to an average prospective client or customer, seems more credible, more dependable, and more professional. I can understand why.

People get websites professionally designed, and they get the copy professionally written. Lots of effort goes into individual pages and navigation depends on the relevance of the pages, not on when they are published. In fact companies spend 1000s of dollars to get their websites designed. This is not so with blogs. Most blogs, even the A-list blogs, look lousy compared to business websites. They may be extremely popular and they may contain jewels of wisdom, when it comes to paying, clients and customers would like to see the real stuff — the website. That’s why most of the blogs are the subsets of the main website when it comes to business blogs.

I think both blogs and websites exist side-by-side and they both have their places. Blogs generally have targeted visitors so the profile of your prospects could be limited. This you can easily make up with the quantity of traffic. Websites on the other hand gets traffic from different spheres and hence there is more chance of getting business from there. I get less traffic at my business website but still I get 5-6 business queries every week. I publish my blog primarily for 3 reasons:

Share my thoughts with others and hence get to know more, like-minded people
Give my prospective clients more insight into my writing and my thinking
Increase traffic to my business website and improve its ranking

So for me, at least for now, blogging is not my bread and butter, but my website is.

Technorati Tags: professional blogging, blogging work, blog publishing, business blogging

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4 Responses to “Is Your Blog Enough for Doing Business?”

Kian Ann
April 2nd, 2007 at 4:52 am
Hey Amrit,

What you say is true. People would pay thousands to get a web designed but not a blog. Many people still see blogs as online journals and rantings.
Tajim
April 12th, 2007 at 1:55 am
Thats true , people mostly corporate have feeling that blogging gives a negative sense to there organistaion , I dont know why but many business people still think bloggging is only for writing personal thoughts
Amrit
April 12th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Hi Tajim.

Yes, they have a blinkered vision. Most of the big organizations keep on existing not because of their interest in innovation, but their scale.
Professional blogs (and blog templates) should be worth more than they are today
May 4th, 2007 at 1:02 am
[...] In Amrit’s recent post “Is Your Blog Enough for Doing Business”, he shared thoughts about blogs generally perceived as lower grade as a corporate website: Compared to a blog, a website, to an average prospective client or customer, seems more credible, more dependable, and more professional…. [...]