eMarketer have an interesting survey "Blog Reading is a Free Floating
Affair" studying how people discover blogs. The study (survey of about
200 respondents) showed that 67% followed links from other blogs.
Recommendations came second at 23%, then search engines 20% then blog
search engines at 5% (multiple responses were allowed).
One hypothesis from this might be that blogs are read by blog people
who search them out in blog-ish fashion. This is also a possible
conclusion from the data about the popularity of the Dilbert blog and
newsletter that I reported a while ago. If so this would be something
you'd want to consider before making a business blog - do you /do you
not want to appeal to blog readers?
But I'm not convinced that the data justify eMarketer's subheading
"Thinking of promoting a blog through search? Don't bother. ". Most of
the respondents in the survey were finding blogs for entertainment
(66%) and for personal interests (43%); with only 33% finding blogs
for education/information and 12% for work or business (multiple
responses were allowed to this question). It may be that they were
looking at a lot of blogs that were run by individuals. And getting
links from other blogs is probably the easiest way for individuals to
spread the word about their blogs. There are several factors to this:
* Comment and trackback features allow a blog owner to make their
own inbound links from other blogs (to an extent, at least)
* There is often an easy-to-find person behind the blog - in my
experience at least, emailing that person (I liked your blog and have
written about it/linked to it) is quite likely to get an interested
response, and perhaps a link (like this link to me, one of my first,
I think). Getting a link from other kinds of websites can be much more
of an effort ("when the webmaster gets around to it")
* Blogging seems easily to lead to posts along the lines that "I
read this on the web and I think it is very true/complete tosh
because..."
By contrast, you have to bother to register for search engines, or be
kindly linked to from a page that already gets visits from robots. I
wonder how many individual bloggers would find it useful to run paid
ads on the engines?
So the survey data may reflect the ways in which many blogs find it
easy or convenient to form links (or what happens when someone
concentrates on writing their blog and doesn't make any real effort to
market it). I'm not at all sure it shows that search doesn't work. My
own blog typically gets more referrals from organic Google listings
than from any single other source (that is Google is less that 50% of
referrals, but is the biggest single slice of the pie. I should say
that I do not expend much effort and no money at all in marketing my
blog, it being mostly for my own professional development.
