Tech Guru Marketing

If you’ve taken the standard online marketing advice to heart (which I’ve been guilty of saying, too), you’ve probably started a blog to promote yourself or your consulting business. As I and others have said, a blog is a great platform for increasing your visibility in the marketplace and demonstrating your knowledge of your topic.

However, the downside of blogging is it can eat up all your time if you’re not careful. To get readers and achieve high Google and Technorati rankings, you have to work on your blog a lot. You need to post on a regular schedule (at least 3 times per week), promote your blog, comment on popular blogs, respond to comments on your blog (if you’re lucky enough to get them), and try to get links from popular sites.

This can take an enormous amount of time, time you probably don’t have, especially if you are working a full-time job while you’re getting your business started.

Is this really the most efficient use of your time?

It depends.  (The unfortunate, but realistic, answer to so many questions in our careers.)

It depends on what your goals really are.

What are your trying to achieve with your blog?

Is you’re goal to gain fame in the blogging community? Or to become an noted authority in your field? Are you hoping to get consulting gigs or speaking requests from around the country (or world)? Is your service something that can be provide remotely (e.g. web design, programming, external pen testing)? Are you hoping to turn your knowledge into an info product?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then blogging may be worth the time for you.

However, if your goal is to do consulting for businesses or consumers in your local market and your service is not something that can be done remotely, then you really need to ask yourself if blogging is a good time investment.

Who are you trying to reach?

Are you trying to reach small business owners or consumers in your local area? Are you trying to reach hiring managers at interesting companies to get a new job? Or are you trying to the attention of like minded professionals around the world? There is nothing wrong with any of these, but blogging tends to work better for some of these audiences than others.

If you are trying to reach a small business owner or hiring manager, good luck. The fact is they are not going to be looking for your blog. They are much too busy to care about what you have to say about anything that isn’t directly related to their business.

So if you’re trying to get their attention, blogging isn’t the way. You will have much better luck using traditional direct marketing (offline or email) techniques and word-of-mouth marketing to get noticed.

Your blog could still be a nice way to establish you as an authority in the minds of your prospects once you have their attention, but you certainly don’t need to be blogging every day to create this effect.

How much time do you have?

Related posts:

1. Ways Not To Spend Your Time When Blogging
2. The Biggest Mistake Consultants Make
3. Getting Your First Customer