Use your blog
to build relationships

In today's click-and-mortar marketplace, you have to think about your market's conversations, understand its influences and needs in real time, and formulate a communication strategy in which to get connected.

If you think you will join the World Live Web (aka: the blogosphere) with a hit-and-run marketing piece, your message will be dead in the water before you will ever make a sale. You must be thoughtful and committed to building relationships.

You have to understand that you don't control the message entirely. You control levels of influence, but consumers have the ultimate choice. Deliver value and people will choose your content and your products.

There are live search directories that patrol the World Live Web for all the live content updates and they index them. This indexing is so fast that mainstream search-engines like Google and Yahoo vigorously search the World Live Web for content.

Blogs provide a much broader reach for your content because of live-content updates. Never before has your content been able to reach so many faraway places. The major search engines are important; however, your content can now get listed on blog and RSS search directories and show up in search results that were never before available.

Blogs have outflanked and outranked mainstream media. Businesses must now speak to bloggers along with using regular media if they want to be effective.

Marketers must be conversational in their messaging and must be interested in building relationships in order to recognize new revenues. Communication is two-way, peer-to-peer, instant flow, in real time. Information no longer flows from the top down but multilaterally through informal and viral Web-based discussions.

Accord to a Pew Internet study in late 2004, of 120 million adult Internet users, seven percent or eight million have blogs. And 27 percent of Internet users say they read blogs, up from 17 percent since February 2004.

This number represents 32-million Americans who are reading blogs! Additionally, the Pew study revealed that 12 percent of Internet users post material or comments on other blogs. That's 14 million people having conversations on blogs. And, 5 percent or six-million say they use RSS to get news and information.

These numbers are huge, despite the naysayers who still don't get it. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for business owners and business bloggers to reach new markets and communicate more effectively within markets.