Blogs have reach and influence, but also build trust
Consensus on blogging: the reach and influence
Although you could try to calculate the ROI (Return On Investment) of your corporate or product blog (Jason Stamper), still in many occasions there will be no direct link between the blog and the revenue made.
The blog is not solely responsible for making the sales.
As Charlene Li says “The ROI of the blog’s – it’s not about the math”
The main importance of the blog is in the Reach and Influence according to Anne Gentle
Whereas MarketingSherpa explains “How to Calculate a Blog’s Reach & Influence — More Complex Than You Think”
This exposé is commented by Vinny Lingham
Wayne Porter explains in “Blogs- Influence Or Reach?”, how blogging has translated into serious dollars.
Whereas Mark Taylor discusses a study on blogging in “The Increasing Reach and Influence of Blogs”
Summarizing:
A blog has:
- Visitors and thus traffic
- RSS feeds that brings the content to many websites and readers
- Inbound hotlinks from blogs to blogs – traffic quality
- SERP (Search Engine Result Page) improves – blog has the keywords related to your products or solutions
- Voice: this is about the influence.
The problem is that most topics are hard to quantify and difficult to bring into relation with a sale or the changes in revenue as many other factors are influencing too.
Reach and Influence – Trust to be added
The Reach and the Influence are obvious; still we would like to add Trust to the list:
Reach:
A blog can reach far beyond your normal communication channels as it gets duplicated, rewritten or referred to.
The blog reaches different audiences in many parts of the world and many different businesses.
Influence:
The blog can become influential with certain groups or communities.
It can acquire a status.
The blog can also send out the same concept of statement over and over again using different wordings, different content or different thesis. Just like “….. washes whiter than ….”.
Trust:
A blog or the blogger can become a trusted party, as he/she has proved on several occasions to have foreseen the future or has giving the right insight.
The blogger builds a relationship with his readers. The readers identify themselves with the blogger and start knowing him, feel like a friend.
If the trust relation is present and the blogger recommends a product or a solution, this trust will drive people to investigate in the recommended product or solution.
For example, if Seth Godin (Seth’s Blog ), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Michael Arrington/Erick Schonfeld (Tech Crunch), Liz Strauss (Successful Blog) or Scobleizer who have all been building trust, advices on any product it sure will generate interest, thus visits.
Will people trust corporate bloggers too?
Probably, because of the trust and relationship that has been build.
Thus write a blog that reaches further than your normal audience, influence your market and build trust.
Then harvest on your investment by implementing LEADSExplorer on your website/blog to know the companies who are visiting and find out about their interest.
