It may not be a great business tool yet, but…
April 6th, 2006
When you see stats like this every marketer should pay attention:
These figures show the growth of blogging sites, and it’s phenomenal. I am interested to see how the local aspect of blogging will take shape, especially from a business perspective. Because let’s face it, for a business in Melbourne Australia there is not a lot of value in being wel-known in Seattle unless you actually turn your blog into an advertising site, which I’m not interested in.
The non-local nature of the Internet has always been a key weakness. In Australia the largest telco, (51% Government owned) launched an Australian specific search engine searching the web, the yellow and white pages, etc. Not sure how successful it is, but the concept of being able to use the Internet to specifically communicate locally makes as much sense as it does to communicate globally, depending on what your goals are.
May 15th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Hi David - many thanks for visiting my blog - I came on over to check out what you’re doing.
This post struck a chord with me because I’m very much into using the Internet as a local lead generation mechanism as well as a national / international marketing tool.
It’s great to see blogging starting to take off. Like you say, Aussie blogging is still well behind the US, but I think we’ll catch up…eventually.
Especially when you start a blog, it can take some time to build up a content base and gain “traction” with an audience. I’ve been blogging off and on for about 6 months with not many tangible results to show for it. But recently I’ve had a few people contact me via my blog, so maybe the thing is working after all!
Regarding local marketing tools, Google works well as a local lead generation tool. We don’t have Google Local in Australia yet, but I’m sure it will be here before too long. When integrated with Google Maps and navigation systems in cars (as is happening in the US) it will be very powerful I’m sure.
I’ve tested sensis.com.au as a lead gen tool with poor results - there just isn’t enough traffic. This might change in time but at this stage Google is where it’s at, followed by Yahoo in a very distant 2nd place and MSN a distant 3rd.
Keep up your blogging efforts David - I’ll be back to see what you’re up to again soon.
Regards
Will