Issac G's Blog

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

That really is the question, isn’t it?

I had a friend, a guy named Dan, over for lunch over the weekend.  “Dan”, I said, “I’ve finally given in to the peer pressure and started a blog.”  He gave me a sideways look, and said “Cool – but how do you have the time for it?”

I thought about that a bit – and then took the question one step farther.  What am I really out to achieve here?  I mean, I’m not a very prominent member of the blog-o-sphere.  I don’t have time to read other folks’, so how (and why) would I find time to make to write to my own?  And frankly, why blog to begin with?

Yes, there’s the social media marketing element – social proof.  Social proof is important – always has been – and is really the natural extension, in my opinion, of “old school” marketing to new age Internet Marketing.  But (somehow) Internet Marketing has done just fine for 15 years or so BEFORE the “social marketing revolution”, so there’s got to be something more…

I think that what it boils down to is what I like to call “The Google Effect”.  15 years ago, there was no Google, and the internet was represented on “The Search Engines” by what webmasters wanted.  There was no “spider” that “crawled” your website and categorized things for the sake of the general public.  There was the Yahoo! index, and anyone coud add a page to it, and tell Yahoo! how to categorize it and what it was about (ahhh..  we were so naive then…)

These days, everyone trusts Google.  Therefore Google becomes some sort of “trust-meter” (kinda like the social networking, but a very different kind of “proof” than “social proof”).

And that’s where blogs fit in.

Blogs are how people get a lot of content out.  But a website can do that too…  No, the reason for blogs is that Google loves to know every person’s innermost thoughts (as long as such person is willing to publicize it in front of the whole world, which somehow has become the norm of our society), and therefore craves anything that remotely smells like it’s personal.

And if Google’s going to eat it up, a smart marketer is going to place himself and his precious content right there.

So it’s got nothing to do with personal.  It can, maybe (for me) it eventually will, but for now it’s just cold business.  And I’ll continue to make the time for it.  If you’re serious about your online business, but never found the time to do this, I suggest that you bite the bullet and do the same.

Until next time…