Bob Truett from Alabama wrote an interesting piece in his Mensa group’s newsletter about animal tails.  Truett cites five purposes for tails:

Balance:
As the animal runs, leaps, or climbs, the tail helps it stay in balance.

Temperature Control:
In cold climates, an animal covers itself with its bushy tail; in warm climates, the tail may be waved like a fan.

Defense:
Brush-tailed porcupines swat enemies with their tails, while garden lizards wiggle their
tails to distract their opponents.

Grasping:
Monkeys come to mind; they can hang by their prehensile tails.

Social Purposes:
You can almost read a dog’s mind, says Truett, by observing his tail.

"Did you ever wonder what our world would be like if humans had evolved with tails?" asks Truett. 

Well, at least in the marketing sense, we do, explains Chris Anderson in his landmark book The Long Tail, referring to the niche marketing that is so relevant to business blogging.

The concept of the Long Tail is based on the fact that, in the physical world, there isn’t enough shelf space to carry everything for everyone, and so a chart showing the demand for different products and services would "tail off" the end of the page. In the digital world, by contrast, there’s room for everything.  The Internet can offer the entire gamut of products and services by connecting consumers to providers.

So, while you have no tail, long or otherwise, "your small business itself has a long tail, one for you to mine and monetize," says Anderson.

Can a small business benefit from having its own blog?  Make that answer a definite "yes".  In the online world, you don’t need big numbers – or big dollars – to make a big difference.  The people who find your blog (and from there your website) are precisely the ones who were searching for your kind of product and service in the first place!

 

Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe the process of new technology continually replacing the old. Nowhere is creative destruction more evident than in business marketing.  "It’s a whole new ball game," say David Verklin and Bernice Kammer, authors of the book Watch This. Listen Up.Click Here. Blogging for business is certainly one of the new ways to play ball when it comes to marketing strategy.

By the time you’ve finished reading one page of their book, Verklin and Kammer point out, 200,000 would-be car buyers and 5,000 would-be brides will have researched wheels and weddings on Google. In fact, using "search" to navigate the Net is so ordinary, google has become an accepted verb! 

If your business isn’t being "creatively destructive" by adopting online marketing strategies, the implication clearly is, you’ll be inhaling competitors’ dust! Roughly three new blogs are started each second of the each day, according to Technorati. Only problem is, keeping them up with enough consistency and frequency to make a difference has proven a problem for more than half of business blogs.  In fact, my profession of ghostblogging was born out of this very not-so-creative "destruction" on the part of business owners too busy running their business to also write about it!

A small business owner’s or professional practitioner’s business blogging efforts can have a disproportionately large effect on marketing results – IF those efforts are kept up.  Those positive effects are enhanced when the information in blog posts is "re-purposed" for print newsletters, brochures, and ads, as professional website copywriter Matt Rouge remarks.
It’s ironic, but true.  With blogging, business owners can have the "creative" without the "destruction"!

The newer technology of blog marketing and more traditional marketing methods can enhance each other, with "old" and "new" playing off each other’s strengths, creating business as they go!