Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

In this day and age, businesses have more ways than ever to reach their clientèle.  Maintaining pathways of communication has never been easier. And, in a tight economy, it’s more crucial than ever.

Blogs are an increasingly popular way of reaching out to a target audience.  They’re free (or better yet, generate ad revenue or sales), and the medium of choice for a growing portion of consumers. There are subtle, yet important, differences however, between blogging as a business and a business’s blog.

When it comes to mixing business and blogs, there are two “big players” at the top of the hill – Gawker.com and Weblogs, Inc.  Both are companies that own and operate multiple blogs for profit.  One of the most popular of those blogs is Lifehacker.com, which advertises itself as having “Tips and downloads for getting things done.”

I spoke with Adam Pash, Lifehacker.com Senior Editor. When asked to comment on the ease of use of a blog, and the connection it can create with a reader base, he said “Our connection to the readers is one of our biggest strengths, inasmuch as our readers are mostly very intelligent, knowledgeable people.” Gawker,  which owns Lifehacker.com, has 25 million pageviews every month, and employs 3 full-time editors for Lifehacker.com.

Obviously, however, there is a difference between an existing company using a blog to increase traffic, and a company OF blogs who just want traffic in general.  Posts that appeal “to the largest possible audience generally do very well,” he says, but “the content of the post or article has to be new or interesting.”  In a business blog, the topics of posts are confined to the area of expertise of the business, and free reign isn’t quite as ubiquitous.

As a writer, Pash has received several freelance jobs for magazines or other Web sites due to his experience at Lifehacker.com.  He loves the freedom of the blog.  He can “research and write about anything I find really compelling,” he says.

The interesting thing about Lifehacker and the the blogs that are part of the Gawker.com or Weblogs Inc. networks are their view on competition.  This is where blogs as a business differ from a business’s blog:  “We don’t really have any direct competitors, but there are plenty of great blogs that cover similar content. The blogosphere is such a terrific give and take, and as such we look at it as much more of a community than a competition. We take care to include via links whenever we post about something we found on another site–it’s sort of the tip of the hat and thanks between blogs. As the quality of other blogs in our space improves, so does Lifehacker, and hopefully vice versa,” says Pash.

Much as competition in business results in a better product for a user, other blogs increase the quality of them all.

On the business side, almost 5,000 of the approximately 112.5 million blogs on the Web are corporate, according to Technorati, a blog indexer.  For a business that uses the Web, they’re almost a requirement.  They increase a company’s Web “footprint,” adding to their public profile.  When recruiting and hiring new employees, this is crucial.  It’s a safe bet that the potential employee, if they’re Web savvy, will sift through a company blog to get a look at the people, the policies, and any information they can glean about a possible employer.

For a smaller business, blogs are a cheap alternative to a marketing budget.  Their cost is inconsequential when compared to the amount of marketing they can provide.

Whether or not you’re trying to simply generate traffic and page views to drive an ad-supported revenue method, or attracting a very specific target audience for a single product or line of services, blogs put readers at ease by opening a line of communication that they’re comfortable with.  Easily accessible, anonymous to read, and offering a great deal of insight to the values of a company’s personnel, blogs are an inroad to exposure.

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