Business Blog Marketing

Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends posted recently about a recent survey conducted by HP. Some interesting findings include:

“Ten percent of small business owners in a recent study reported that they have included blogs in their marketing plans. And 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next 2 to 3 years.”

Which is pretty interesting considering less than half of all businesses have web sites. Additional comments from Anita on Blogs and SEO:

“SEO firms also figure in this mix. As the number of business blogs grows, it becomes harder to stand out. Search engine optimization (SEO) for blogs will become important just as it is for websites.”

In fact, SEO is important for blogs right now. This blog ranks #1 on Google and #2 on Yahoo for “marketing blog” in part, because of SEO. To be on the same search results page as Dana VanDen Heuvel, Seth Godin and John Jantsch is pretty amazing.

Not only are small businesses considering blogs in their marketing strategy, but BtoB publishers are pondering it over at American Business Media’s Spring Meeting. BtoB Magazine posted an article that basically says publishers acknowledge the potential value of blogging but are taking a cautious approach.

The folks over at BusinessWeek are not cautious about blogging at all with articles like, “Blogs Will Change Your Business” that offers a pretty thorough overview of where blogs fit in.

Love ’em or hate ’em, blogs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.