Don’t Get the Blogging Math Problem Wrong – special guest post by Ryan Cox

Today’s post is by friend and fellow blogger Ryan L. Cox.

I’ll be the first one to admit it: writing was not my strength in academia.  I come from a math bloodline. My father was good in math, like perfect-math-portion-of-the- SAT’s good. "In math, Ryan, everything is black and white; there is always a right answer," I was taught.

Often times I find myself comparing the three L’s, Life, Love, and Law, to math, searching for the right and wrong, black and white. For this the math kid to find a natural fit in writing is simply preposterous, but it happened. And my advice to every business professional out there is plain and simple: if you are not blogging for yourself or having someone blog on your behalf, you are getting this math problem wrong.

We’ve sprinted, not walked, into a do-it-now-or-be-lost-forever Internet-driven business world. Technical innovation has swung the pendulum far past the point where business can remain entrenched in handling consumers. Does anyone remember near-time consumption?  Anyone? Bueller? We dove into the deep end of real-time. Consumerism can be described in one word: NOW!  If I think about something, I turn to Google and search for it. If you do not show up to give me information, I’ll have already given third party authority and my interest to someone else. If you do not have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, I’ll consider you old and outdated. If I cannot find that your website uses “flash”, or if your contact information is hard to find, I’ll forget your business exists.

The moral of this story: blogging is important to the marketing message.  Here are 5 easy-to-understand reasons why:

            It’s free.  
WordPress and Blogger are both free blogging platforms.  Even if you don’t have a website (you should have fixed this yesterday!), you can have a blog.  Heck, a well-customized free WordPress blog can be turned into your website!

            It gets people talking.
With the social sharing plugins that are available for a blog: (Facebook Like, Twitter RT, Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg, Share This, Add This, etc..) you give your consumers the ability to share your message. From your standpoint as a business owner, that’s free marketing from unpaid workers.

           It’s expected.
Plain and simple, consumers expect you to have something that at least resembles a blog, providing new content on no worse than a weekly basis.

            It has search engine optimization (SEO) value.
Save for another conversation the debate of how much value.  The “low ceiling” explanation is that a blog sends signals to Google to constantly crawl your website for new content. The more history in the search engines, especially around the keywords associated with your business or product, the better.

         People are going to talk about your service or product.
         You might as well increase the chances that you can capture the conversation. 
         There is nothing stopping me (a competitor or consumer) from slamming your
         company everywhere I see fit.  However, if I know that you have a website and
         a blog, it’s more likely I will come directly to the source to complain giving you a
         better chance of putting out the fire.

The marketing budget for a business owner has been turned upside down by the emergence of social media, blogging and real-time communications. No one has perfected the dissemination of messaging from business to consumer. The pricing market for these services is still very fluid. Regardless, their importance has been made quite clear. So what is the takeaway from this post?

The right answer to this math problem is: You need to have a blog. Whether the “your own gun” or the “hired gun” method is better for conveying your particular message is dependent on your individual situation.ch individual. At the end of the day, a blog needs to be part of your marketing message.

I’m living proof: excuses are meaningless.  Shut Up And Do It Already.

Wow, Ryan – you’ve made quite a compelling case for blogging. Say It For You, of course, comes at business blogging from BOTH the "your own gun" (we offer business blogging assistance) and the "hired gun" (by serving as freelance SEO copywriters) angles. Blogging for business is not a be-all and end-all – it’s part of any company’s marketing strategy and tactics development.
Thanks for the reminder (warning?) that we all continue to sprint into a do-it-now internet-driven world. Business blog writing is one brand of "running gear".
 – Rhoda