Content Marketing Today

Big-Time Marketing Consultant is Dead Wrong about Blogging

He says you have to be famous to make blogging work.  I say it’s just the opposite: working at blogging can make you famous.

In perhaps the ultimate irony, self labeled ‘ contrarian consultant,’ Alan Weiss, trashes social media in general–and blogs in particular–in his… get this: blog.  Debbie Weil brought this to my attention in her recent BlogWrite for CEOs article.

Actually, he claims that blogging is effective for consultants only if you are already famous in your area of expertise.  He cites himself as one example.

Here’s what he has to say:

Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand. People come here, or go read Seth Godin, or Marshall Goldsmith, or Jeffrey Gitomer, or David Meister, because we’re all well known in our areas of expertise. That is, a blog follows a brand, not the other way around. You can’t create a brand just with a blog, unless you’re ridiculously lucky, and business can’t be based on luck.

I believe he reaches this conclusion in spite of a massive amount of evidence to the contrary. 

In fact, he sets up a straw man argument to make his case: because there are 200 million blogs and most of them are crap, virtually all blogs must be crap.  He also states that buyers of consulting services “may visit a blog after they have a relationship with a consultant,” but don’t visit them to make buying decisions. 

The experience of thousands of successful blogger/consultants contradicts his premise.  The more typical scenario is for prospective clients to visit your blog/website once they have met you for the first time or heard about you, to make sure that you are for real and know what you are talking about.

What’s true is that dozens of otherwise obscure but intelligent and articulate individuals have launched blogs that became wildly successful on the Internet.  This is not because they began as famous.  It happened because they had something to say and said it very well.  But, you don’t need to become famous to use a blog successfully.  You simply need to provide relevant and compelling content that resonates with your current and future buyers.  After all, as a consultant, clients are renting your brains.  What better way to demonstrate that you have a brain in your head than to provide consistent, valuable content on a blog?

Since Allen cited himself as an example, I will do the same to contradict him.  I started blogging in October 2007 and have since written more than 200 blog posts.  Virtually everything I have written focuses on content marketing and related marketing, PR, and advertising topics.  When I began, hardly anybody on the Internet was aware of me.  Not all that many more were aware of the concept of ‘ content marketing.’  As a direct result of a consistent weekly output of content marketing related articles, my blog/website comes up #1 on Google when you search for the term, content marketing.  Similarly, in the fourth quarter of 2007 the search term, content marketing, led only a few dozen people to my site; in the first quarter of 2008, more than 1600 content marketing searches directed visitors to ContentMarketingToday.com.

This is not to suggest that I’m famous.  Far from it.  But I can say unequivocally that my presence on the web has generated business opportunities and business relationships that would have been impossible without my online presence.

So, to conclude: Alan Weiss is a smart guy.  He has been successful for decades.  But he could not be more wrong on the subject of business and blogging.  However, if you are still debating the merits of starting your own blog take a look at his post and the intense comment debate it sparked.  I think you will be inspired to get going on the web–even if you do not yet have a strong brand.  In fact, if you lack a strong brand, you had better get started today.