To Blog or Not to Blog?

I just stumbled on a terrific article from Promo Magazine. I'd like to highlight some of the stats from this article:

In the trust hierarchy, both groups said they were most likely to base purchase decisions on reader comments to blog posts (14% for overall, 18% for frequent), a niche blog covering a specific product or service of interest (11% and 15% respectively), or a blog written by a professional in the field (10% and 14%). information gathered from social network sites ranked lower than any of those groups for purchase trust (7% and 10%).

Researchers found that 50% of the blog readers among the more than 2,000 U.S. online consumers polled said they find blogs useful for purchase information.

This goes to show that blogs are a huge way of building your brands trust factor. People buy from people and trust people like them. If I read a blog post from someone who purchased a product I'm researching at the time...and they rave about it, that is huge for me. I don't typically make major purchases without researching it for a time first. Blogs are a terrific source of information and building the case for myself and other consumers to finally commit to a purchase.