What good is a blog?

A lot of publishers think about having blogs. And I was asked recently what the benefit is of The Worsley Blog?

To at least some extent it is an indulgence. The return from the Google ads at the top of this page is a hundred or two a year and it does produce some directly attributable sales of Worsley Press books, plus getting some good listings in the search engines which improve the general business image.

Most of the blog items I write start out as comments I make on the various email lists I subscribe to, or as answers to people who email questions to The Worsley Press (often via the comments form on the web site), so very little specific time is spent on creating the blog. I also have it set up so that a blog item can be created by sending an email to a "secret" email address, so little time is wasted and even so I only create 3 or 4 items a month. I should do better.

I subscribe to a lot of blogs via their rss feeds using SharpReader and my finger is hovering over the delete key in the newreader, so the first half dozen words are all it takes for a decision to bring my finger down. I hope the first half dozen words of this blog were good enough to get you this far.

The blogs I receive which are from the CEOs or owners of larger businesses tend to be irregular and exist because the people writing them look on them as a more personal contact than a company newsletter -- sometimes they seem to try out ideas on the blog before they make it to the newsletter or to official policy.

I cannot see many successful blogs which are just sales blurbs. As an advertising medium, I'd rate it very low. But if you have someone who wants to do it, has the freedom to say what they want, and it is not a directly attributable wages cost, it could just possibly give one of the best returns. Just possibly.