A Good Product Yields a Strong Brand.

Forbes: The Making Of A $2 Billion Brand

Even more remarkable is the fact that Google has become a valuable household name without spending a dime on advertising to reach consumers. The search site has never placed a TV spot, a print ad or an online banner in search of users, according to Google VP of corporate marketing Cindy McCaffrey.

OK, so Google's all over the news these days but this article talks about the power of a strong product. Build something so powerful, so needed, so superior to everything else out there and it will succeed on it's own. It's the Purple Cow thing. [MarketingFix]

The Forbes article also stated that Google logged 16.1 million search hours in October 2002 -- that's 2.1 million MORE hours than Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves combined!

Should businesses pay attention to business blogging?

Let's do the math. Google loves information that is fresh and updated frequently. Blogs exist on a diet of fresh content updated frequently. The more Google finds freshly updated content, the more often their little robots visit the blog...resulting in high Google search rankings of ALL of your blog-powered information.

Google bought a blogging pioneer, Blogger, last week and they say they don't even know how they are going to use the company! [NY Times - requires free subscription]

OK. Can you think of a reason why your business shouldn't start a business-blog (b-blog)?

Reasons why you might not want to blog:

• you have no timely information to share with your customers or prospects
• you are happy with the results and ROI from banner and email marketing
• your current search engine optimization company has guaranteed you top positions in 3-6 months
• you have heard that blogging is a fad and won't last

Before you adding to this tongue-in-cheek list, here is a list of a few business benefits of starting to blog immediately:

• high search ranking on Google with no paid-submission (Google is one of the few engines that doesn't have a paid submission program)
• Google's competitors will position you higher -- everyone watches the leader and most improve your search positions due to high Google PageRank
• high ROI - pay-per-click is a great vehicle but no-cost marketing has infinite ROI
• you are creating this visibility with information that you should be sharing with your customers and prospects anyway
• new information appears on Google in days, not weeks
• other bloggers point prospects towards you -- for free!

Got questions about business blogging? Send your questions to questions@BlogAnswerman.com.

While most search engines are becoming more and more adept at detecting 'spam' pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency - some companies that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into the 'spam' category. [Search Engine Guide]