Blogging is No Marketing Silver Bullet
In an article on how some small businesses see blogging as "a low-cost, high return marketing tool," the New York Times has an interesting two paragraphs:
I'm not suggesting that blogs make no sense. They can, and there may be a number of reasons to have them. Heck, I run five, and I see various benefits. But if you want something that will fill your place of business with no other effort, this simply isn't the answer.
David Harlow, a lawyer and health care consultant in Boston, said he started his blog, HealthBlawg, as a way of marketing himself after he left a large law firm and opened his own practice. Besides, he said, blogging was easy to get started and the technology was straightforward.Any business looking for the "magic" of blogging should consider this: two years, a few hundred visits a day, a few clients. Notice the appearance of the word "few." This isn't a quick fix. The owner of an organic chocolate snack company mentioned starting a blog, but not any quantifiable payoff. An ice cream manufacturer experimented for a number of years with different blogs and ended up with one about personal finance, which it saw as a way to attract people and then let them see ads for the actual products.
Now, after about two years of blogging, Mr. Harlow said he was pleased with the results. He gets about 200 to 300 visits a day, he said. He has also become a source for publications looking for commentary on regulatory issues in the health care field and has even gained a few clients because of the blog. In addition, he has formed relationships with other legal bloggers (who call themselves blawgers) and consultants around the country.
I'm not suggesting that blogs make no sense. They can, and there may be a number of reasons to have them. Heck, I run five, and I see various benefits. But if you want something that will fill your place of business with no other effort, this simply isn't the answer.
Permalink posted by Erik Sherman at 1:47 PM
2 Comments:
Agree that blogging should not be sole way to garner work. But I work with a significant number of good lawyers whose sole means of marketing is their blogging and they are getting a large number of clients and growing their practice as a result.
The key is to know what you are doing when blogging. Most lawyers do not. Of those lawyers blogging as marketing tool, 90% are going to have little, if any, success. That's not because blogging does not work. It's because they are not blogging effectively. And blogging effectively does not mean taking a lot of time.
Let's not diss the medium if you are not using it as well as others.
I don't see anyone, including myself, dismiss blogging. And certainly there are ways to do it well and ways to not. Knowing something about lawyers, and often covering legal issues and the business issues of law firms, I'm highly skeptical that lawyers are using blogging as a "sole means of marketing." Not a chance - they work on building relationships and will do a lot of things that won't be apparent as marketing. So even if a blog is the only visible sign from the outside, you can bet a successful lawyer is meeting people, getting referrals, and taking other steps to bring in business.
Given that Mr. OKeefe's business is providing marketing blogs to professional services, and to laywers in particular, I'd say that too close an emphasis on a given tool or technique can potentially blind business judgment as quickly as not grasping a medium. Ultimately, blogging is a form of publishing, and you have to provide something that the readers find valuable. Whether that can translate into an obvious benefit for the blogger will depend significantly on the individual circumstances.
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