Chris Baggott, friend and owner of Compendium Blogware, recently wrote about What can the Irish Teach American Business Bloggers?
Quite a lot, actually.
A survey from the Irish Internet Association shows that 39% of their respondents post several times a week, and that 50% of them spend up to four hours per week blogging.
Chris asked the question, how can Irish businesspeople justify this investment in time. Simple. They use it to generate business.
According to the IIA, they use blogging for:
For Baggott, the most important question the IIA asked was “who is the target audience for your business blog?” For 89% of the Irish bloggers, it’s their potential customers. But according to a Forrester Survey, U.S. marketers say “brand awareness” is their primary reason to blog.
If you’re blogging for brand awareness, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. You put your logo on the side of a bus for brand awareness. You sponsor a little league team for brand awareness. You blog for search results and sales leads.
A brand is an emotional attachment between a customer and a company or product. It’s also the lame excuse marketers offer –– we’re building brand awareness –– for why they either can’t measure a marketing campaign or why that campaign didn’t work.
But you don’t build that attachment by telling people how great your product or company is. You build it by solving problems, answering questions, getting to know your customers, and letting them get to know you.
“Hey, lookit how great we are” won’t do that. “Here’s how you fix that” will.
Blogging is the best way to answer the “how” questions your customers have. You can create an entire knowledge base with a blog, doing nothing but answering questions from your customers, and dominate search results for your field. Because if one person has the question, others do too. Lots of others.
And those others are looking for the answers. They’re going to Google to find the answers, and Google is checking you out to see if you’re answering the question. If you’re not, they’re going to find someone who is.
One question that gets asked a lot by new clients is “Should we start with a blog or should I start with building social media profiles?” 
