Got insomnia? Read a blog...

I am here to declare publicly, that I am fed up to the back teeth with blogs!

Much like Viagra, blogs are presently the be all and end all of all problems of people finding you and your services on the website - apparently. They not only attract and educate, they also (by themselves) sell. They are the universal Duck Tape to all your problems, and the way to make you millions. And all you have to do is write, and the great Google/SEO will find and do it all for you - WOW!

But seriously, have you ever read any of this tosh? Do I really want to know what coffee a lady in Seattle had this morning? Do I need to know what razor a guy in New York used? Why would I care what newspaper a financial analyst read (I just want to know which shares he bought)? Why do I need to know what desk a secretary in Paris sat at? Accepted that knowing the fitness guru suggests I choose a nice healthy salad over a burger is very useful, but if your latest and greatest customer wants to go to a burger bar to eat burgers are you really going to insist that the staff remove the standard light blue cheese sauce in front of him? And why would I want to know the sexual exploits of a Japanese Geisha?

If you happen to need a new razor/car/more life insurance, then the next problem is reading this stuff. Most of it is a conglomeration of: pushed product, personal biases, and their state of mind written by an untrained writer who thinks they are the next JK Rowling: except, they read more like JRR Tolkein re-writing the second draft of Lord of the Rings! After you have ploughed through twenty pages of football teams and how your latest girlfriend was impressed by the smoothness of you skin, you need a cut throat more than a triple bladed safety.

And that brings me to my third point - does anyone read past the third page of Goggle or any Search Engines results? NO! So your recommendation on which ISA to buy and how to choose it is mangled with every other IFA's blog on ISA's and how to choose them. Its like one great big "five o'clock on a summers day, everyone wants to get out of the city to the beech" traffic jam. So the guy who wins is the guys with more typing Russians/Chinese or more dollars in his marketing budget, gaining him more exposure eventually. Yes, there may be more information, but there's also too much information.

And that brings me to my final point - honestly, people do do business off of the web still. Billboards work; magazines work; telephones work - in fact, much as though the web is great, its still not the universal I-ching key. Its like one piece in a child's twenty piece jigsaw puzzle of a marketing plan - essential, but not everything, and doesn't spoil the overall picture if lost. If the average Joe/Josephine is faced by a log jam of blog, then he/she goes back to what and who he/she knows, and what he/she see's around him/her in their daily life, and most importantly in this modern world what the Jones's have - honestly, simplicity works.

To my mind, the blog has simply created a larger volume of traffic on the web, but in the same percentage proportions of when no one was blogging: more traffic, same overall percentages of brand awareness.

Do blogs work? Yes, I know they do - they work to differentiate. My sister implemented one at her university (its in twenty languages so far, not one of them English) written by students about their course experiences - sales are up 10%. My brother in law implements them all the time for political parties to create debate, and they find out the weight of opinion at a quicker rate of what we are all thinking about/what their parties now need to talk about and in what tone in a far quicker cycle. And Graham Jones says that his attracts people to him, and gains him speaking bookings - I'm sure his does, its easy to read and light on touch, and gives potential customers a good view of him.

But blogs as a universal answer - No! Blogs as an answer to creating your millions - No! Blogs as part of an overall marketing plan - Yes! Blogs as a differentiator - Absolutely! Blogs as presently a homeopathic cure to insomnia - Oh, definitely!!!