November 30, 2008

Three Reasons Why We Should All Read The Top Blogs In Our Niche

Although blogging has been around almost since the earliest days of the Internet, many people who regularly use the web do so completely unaware of the impact that 'personal journaling' or blogging has had on the internet and business world.

So, for the very first post in this blog about web marketing for coaches, I'd like to share with you the top three reasons why I think every coach, consultant, author, NLP professional, complementary therapist – in fact just about everyone – would benefit hugely from reading blogs in their specialist interest or business niche.

Let me be clear that I mean 'reading' blogs in this instance, not writing them. I'll address the many reasons why writing and maintaining your own blog is so advantageous in the next post after this.

Top Three Reasons Why Every Coach Should Read Blogs:

1) Authentic information v corporate-speak

This is the number one reason why blogging has taken off, especially in the last 5 years or so. Blogs started out mainly as personal diaries that people updated in public via their own internet web site. Needless to say if there's one thing people want to know about, its other people's personal stories and experiences. That curiousity is seemingly hard-wired into the human mind and it drives the never-ending, global fascination with the lives of celebrities everywhere. However, we are equally fascinated by even quite mundane stories about ordinary people's experiences in their lives.

Part of the reason for that is the authenticity of blogs. We love to listen to people's stories especially when they may be instructive for us in our own lives. Blogs typically contain stories about people's personal experiences, either in general or about a specific topic or theme. These stories can range from the trivial, i.e. one person's experience of buying a new fridge, to matters of life and death e.g. the story of someone's recovery from a life-threatening disease such as cancer.

Increasingly though, blogs are essential tools for businesses, the media and even governmental officials to release timely information in a convenient and palatable way. The style of blogs is informal, even casual, much like a conversation between friends. This not only helps us to understand the information, but also enjoy the process.

Compare that to the typical experience of trying to find out useful information on business or 'official' web sites. How often is the dry and dull language of 'corporate-speak' either useful or entertaining? Things are starting to change, of course, but there is an increasing taste among the internet-using public for authentic information which, once experienced, makes the dull, traditional variety boring and unacceptable.

2) Identify and build relations with key thought-leaders in your niche

One of my favourite bloggers about blogging and internet marketing is an Australian called Yaro Starak. His blog Entrepreneurs-Journey.com contains a huge quantity of valuable information combined with Yaro's personal experience. In one of Yaro's posts he describes how bloggers are 'thought-leaders' because they need to know a lot about a particular subject in order to produce content for their blog on a sufficiently regular basis. These people are often seen as the 'authority figures' in a particular area, and just by reading their blogs you will learn from them and increase your own knowledge and expertise as a result.

Furthermore, blogs are interactive. This means not only do you get to read or listen to the personal thoughts of your favourite expert, but you also get a chance to ask them a question and even get a personal reply back in return. The interactive nature of commenting is another huge reason why blogs and other social networking tools are only becoming more and more popular, while readership of traditional mainstream media like print newspapers and TV is falling away fast.

3) Blogs are much easier to follow than normal websites

The last of my top three reasons why coaches should read blogs is that keeping up with blogs is infinitely easier than trying to track updates at traditional websites. The one reason why this is so is thanks to the power of RSS feeds. So, what exactly is an RSS feed? Let me explain…

Every time a new 'post' (i.e. an article) gets published to a blog, it sends out an update to the internet via what is called an RSS feed. There are very clever and normally free types of software (I use and highly recommend Google Reader), that can not only recognise these updates, but also collect and organize them for you to browse in one convenient location, whenever you wish.

So in effect, if you subscribed to 100 blogs, you could collect and view the updates to all of the blogs in one place, at the same time, and for free! In a future post I will make and share a brief video with showing exactly how to subscribe to the RSS feed from this blog. If you're feeling a bit confused, however, don't worry, once you've seen this in action it all starts to make sense, I promise!

Now if you wanted to follow 100 normal websites what exactly would you do? You would have to visit all 100, one at a time, just to see if there was an even an update worth reading at all! The reality is that no-one has time to do this so we don't do it. Blogs, however, allow us the luxury for the first-time ever of being able to keep in touch with a huge number of different sources of information, without taking a huge chunk of our time away in the process.

Yaro's post I mentioned above also describes how successful bloggers are very good both at reporting on news items in their interest area as well as their own personal learning experiences. In order to keep learning and reporting back your views and experiences to others, it is useful to have a wide variety of informational inputs e.g. from other prominent people and companies in your niche. So in the age 'BB' (Before Blogging), this was a much harder and more time-consuming process.

Those are the three key reasons why every coach should read blogs in their niche. In future posts I will focus on why writing your own blogs can be so be beneficial for coaches, consultants and NLP professionals.

What are the key blogs in your niche? Go and find some today and start subscribing!