Blogs are great for marketing. But not if your definition of marketing is interrupting your prospects, or promoting your service instead of helping them solve a problem. Interruption marketing and blogs don’t go together.
There are a lot of misconceptions about blogs, and whether they are useful for marketing or not. But if you approach them from the perspective of sharing information to help readers solve a problem, then blogs are excellent marketing tools.
A recent post by Seth Godin expresses the concept concisely:
The most effective marketing use of blogs seems to be when the advertiser/marketer uses the blog as an opportunity not to sell a product, but to attract people who are in the right mindset. Joel Spolsky rarely writes about his product, but that’s fine. The people who read his writing are the very same people who need his product, and his proximity to the valuable ideas (and his reputation) makes it not such a leap to go ahead and buy what he has to sell.
Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.
You can read the full (short) post if you click here.