...not unless your expectations are realistic.

Before I began writing this newsletter, I posted the question above on LinkedIn. I wasn't surprised when several of the responses I received noted that monetization is often overemphasized when proposing and evaluating a corporate blogging strategy. I completely agree. In general, I would say that too much has been said and written to over-hype the business benefits of blogging, especially when it comes to direct monetization and the idea of building community.

I mentioned above that the two compelling reasons to blog for a professional services firm are expertise and SEO. Naturally, it would stand to reason, then, that expecting to make money directly from the blog would be inappropriate. However, if your blog continues to grow with rich and relevant content, you should expect to gain more and more search-generated traffic, which could easily be converted into valuable leads. I also noted that building a community around your brand is an inappropriate expectation; this kind of thing rarely happens around services like it does with products. However, if your expertise and thought leadership becomes evident in your blog, you might slowly start to assemble a "community" of regular readers, and they may even start to comment on your posts. But a quick word about that...

Revered PR blogger Brian Solis says that lack of comments means lack of influence, but I say don't expect a ton of comments unless you are approaching A-list (or even B-list) status. In fairness, Solis also says that "measuring the success of a blog based on the amount of comments is just lame," and I completely agree. It is lame. Very, very lame. In fact, according to Jakob Nielsen's study, 90% of online community users are lurkers, meaning they read but don't comment, while only 9% contribute a 'little' and 1% contribute actively. While this study is not specific to blog comment participation, it's likely that the principle is applicable though the numbers may have a "+ or -" factor. This means that the majority of those regular readers will probably not be commenting on your posts anytime soon.

Comments are not going to be the best judge of the current success of a blog. You'll also need to look at the number of readers, knowing that many of them will remain lurkers for some time to come. As with anything, there is always room for improvement, so as readership increases, commenting should also. There is no magic wand to use to instantly get lots of traffic to your blog; it just takes time.   next >