In a post at the end of last year, Des Walsh on his excellent new B5 Media blog, Business and Blogging, picked out a post by Ben Yoskovitz which focused on the argument that business blogging is not a sales pitch but rather a meaningful conversation.

You’ll get no argument from me on the “Sales pitch” front. There are lots of excellent direct marketing and sales tools available to businesses but a business blog is not one of them. You’re quite simply not playing to its strengths if you try to use it in that way.

However, a conversation (meaningful or otherwise) is only useful, from a business perspective, if it leads somewhere. The conversation shouldn’t try to lead straight to an attempted sale – in fact it mustn’t, you’re back to direct selling again there. Nevertheless, to be properly effective, it should have a direction and be taking you towards your desired outcome, whether that is developing the relationship, encouraging a news feed sign up, setting up a face to face meeting etc.

Ben also makes the point that:

“It’s not about telling people why you’re great and why they should do business with you.”

Agreed. But if you shift the emphasis slightly then you get a concept which is much more valid for blogs. For me:

“It’s about demonstrating to people why you’re great (or helping people find out why you’re great) and why they should do business with you.”

Don’t tell them, but do make it easy for them to find out through what you write and the way that you write it. For me this comes down to the distinction between selling to someone (an individual or a business) and helping them to decide that they want to buy from you.

Selling vs Helping to buy

Direct (Interruption) Marketing vs Educational Marketing

Successful business blogs sit very firmly in the second category.

If you do this well, then hopefully you’ll find that you don’t need to go and tell people why you are great because you’ll have others doing that on your behalf, either in their own blogs, on their sites or face to face. And that’s probably the clearest sign that you are running a valuable and well focused business blog.