by Mack Collier A recent study by eMarketer forcasted the next five years of blog readership, and creation.  The findings weren’t surprising, as eMarketer expects the number of people that read blogs, and those that blog themselves, to continue to grow dramatically.  What this means for your business is that increasingly, your customers are going to be reading blogs, and writing them. eMarketer is now forecasting that 58% of the U.S. internet population will be reading blogs by 2013, a roughly 20% increase over current levels.  Additionally, eMarketer sees 17% of the U.S. Internet population blogging in 2013, almost a 30% increase over current levels. If your customers are going to be increasingly reading blogs and writing blogs themselves, how much longer can your business afford to not take part in online conversations that are happening around your company and your industry?  Two common objections that small businesses offer to adopting a blogging strategy is that they don’t have time, and no one online is talking about them anyway.  First, limited resources/time is a very real consideration for many small businesses.  If you don’t have the time and/or people to launch a blogging strategy, you can still build relationships with bloggers and leverage this as a way to increase awareness of your business online.  This post offers a great primer for launching a blogger outreach strategy in 24 hours . The second objection many small businesses offer to why they aren’t blogging is that no one is blogging about their business now, so why should they care?  This indicates that the business has an awareness problem online, as do many small businesses.  But the great advantage that a small business has over a large company is that they can often times CREATE the online conversation around their business, instead of reacting to it.  Think about it, most large companies have plenty of people talking about them online.  But that means the conversation already exists, and the best they can hope for is to participate in that conversation.  While a small business, can often times create the conversation around them.  That means that can have more control over the form and flow of the conversation.  A large company will likely have to do some ‘damage control’ when they first enter into an online conversation, because there might be some misconceptions about them.  But a small business can start out with a clean slate and get their point of view out from the start.  They don’t have to ‘repair’ tarnished images that large companies frequently have to do. So my advice is to start now by monitoring what your current and potential customers are saying online about you, your competitors, and your industry.  Participate as you can, and look for ways to use blogs as a tool to connect with your customers.  As eMarketer’s study indicates, these people are going to increasingly be using blogs to talk about you, your competition, and your industry.  Why not become a participant in that conversation?  Check out our small business news site.

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Small Businesses Can No Longer Ignore Blogs

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