CT Biz Blogs

The short answer: yes and no.

The longer answer:

It depends. It depends on what you blog, how you blog, and what other people blog about you.

This post is inspired by an article in the Boston Globe, “Blogs ‘essential’ to a good career.“

The article makes some good points about the positive side of blogging. Blogging can indeed be good for your career, if you do it right.

While the article focuses mainly on the impact of blogging for a career, I think point #5 is especially important for small businesses:

5. Blogging makes self-employment easier.

You can’t make it on your own unless you’re good at selling yourself. One of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of marketing yourself is with a blog. When someone searches for your product or service, make sure your blog comes up first.

Curt Rosengren, a career coach, periodically Googles ‘’career passion” — words he thinks are most important to his business — just to make sure his blog comes up high on the list. He estimates that his blog generates at least half of his coaching business.

A bunch of bloggers have weighed in with their opinions on the article.

Valorie Luther, of Creative Concepts, writes about how she wishes she’d checked out the blog of a prospective business associate, and goes on to say, “Blogging=life=business opportunities=reputation.”

Jeremiah Owyang thinks that blogging is a “…supplement, a tool, and a communication device that can set you apart –it’s NOT essential.” I agree with him. Of course, we’re both using a blog to communicate our ideas!

Bubba M, who’s guest-blogging for Robert Scoble this week, adds the reminder that blogging can also lead to “information leakage,” as when a friend “…posted pictures a long time ago that came back to haunt someone else in a job search. ” He also mentions Mark Jen, who has bounced back nicely after being fired from Google for blogging too much information about the company.

Here’s the deal — all the good things you can get from blogging — the reputation, the search engine optimization, the networking, the marketing — you can get some other way. But blogging is one of the easiest ways I know of to do all that, all rolled up into one application.

However, the thing to remember is that, as easy as blogging can make it to get a good reputation, it’s also easy to get a bad reputation, if you’re not willing to put in the time, planning, and effort to do it the right way.

Does that mean that it’s best for a business to avoid blogging altogether, just to be safe? Well, first, what’s safe? Certainly not owning a business! And second, only if you have some other relatively inexpensive, easy means of getting what blogging gives you, or you just don’t need it as a way to connect with customers, share your expertise, or build your business.