Hogtown Consulting

One common reason for businesses to blog is to build authority in their market. In a sense this authority building excercise is like giving away free trials to potential customers, by writing often and well about topics relevant to your market you hope to gain attention and eventually customers.

Paul Chaney writes about this strategy on the All Business blog.

Blogs give you a platform for articulating your viewpoint, knowledge, expertise and experience with your readers. Because they are routinely updated you get the opportunity to get very specific regarding your field of endeavour, and tell your story over and over again.

I don’t have to look far to find an example of a business blogging for these reasons, because the Hogtown blog is an example built with exactly this goal in mind. The intention is to write about topics, technology and the web in this case, that are interesting to your target market, small to medium businesses and organisations. But this isn’t an altruistic excercise, it’s just another form of marketing, albeit more useful and less fluff-filled than much marketing.

The idea is that by writing accessible and useful pieces for this blog we gain readers who are interested in learning about those things. Then when one of my readers has an Internet project they need help with they will think, ‘hey, why don’t we call Hogtown, they seem to know about this stuff from what I’ve read on their blog’.

So that’s building authority, it is really just a technological extension of traditional marketing techniques like writing articles for trade journals or attending trade shows to improve awareness in the marketplace of what your company knows and does.