As our Client Success team, the folks responsible for day-to-day work with our clients interact with current and soon to be clients, we get a frequent and re-occurring question … and it goes: 

"We love Compendium and we “get” the blogging for search, but what’s the real difference between “blogging” and “blogging for business?”

It’s a simple question and it goes to the core of what Compendium stands for.  And, the answer is equally simple and really can best be understood by understanding the division of writing for pleasure, as a hobbyist, what we like to call a “Citizen Journalist,” and blogging for results, or blogging for business.

Blogging for pleasure and blogging for results.

In talking with customers, I usually use myself as my own baseline or example.
I have a personal wine blog (www.goodgrape.com).  I happen to like wine and I happen to like to write—hence, I view my blog as a hobby, a creative outlet.
Now, mind you, my blog has yielded some interesting results for me, the least of which are wine samples, wine books and other flotsam and jetsam that are sent to me in order to try and influence me, as others view me as an alpha-influencer.

This influencer model is great and typifies what thousands and millions of other people try to do—cultivate influence with loyal readership.  In doing so, you get into a “jetstream” of community in the niche in which you write, but to get to the point where I am at today, (about 1000 - 1200 daily readers, a bunch of hits and pageviews, etc.) it has taken very consistent content creation (4-6 posts per week) and a lot of social networking over the course of 2.5 years.

While this is a fine model for individuals, it’s not that great of a model for businesses.  It’s very difficult to get somebody in the marketing department to chew off on a two or three year “influencer” model, and with good reason.

However, and thankfully, the underpinning of Compendium is to blog for business.  What that means is that instead of trying to cultivate a readership by writing good content that goes into a category bucket, you try to cultivate content for search engine optimization by writing good content that gets compended into a keyword blog (our equivalent of a category), so people who are searching for those “keywords” can quickly and easily find you in the search engines (Google dominates search) and then subsequently find something you are saying of value-- enough value to want and stay on your site for a while and do some other action that drives to a metric for your organization.

It’s very simple, but a very important paradigm shift in thinking.  Social media, as an umbrella over a bunch of different things, including blogging, is great, but it’s really only great in business if it drives a result.

Many people will tell you that influence is the new currency, and they wouldn’t be completely wrong, but the part they don’t get right is that influence doesn’t equal a sales number and using your blog as a business tool to drive engagement with customers is very important, as well.

So, what is the real difference between blogging and blogging for business, or blogging for a purpose?  

Results.

Blogging for a purpose with Compendium delivers the kind of results tied to a metric that can be delivered infinitely quicker than a two year slow burn of influence.