March 22nd, 2008

Traditional advertising has some huge benefits the internet has found difficult to replicate. There isn’t a goodwill equivalent of sponsoring a little league team, or a targeted audience quite as captive as putting a notice in the Sunday bulletin, but there are still advantages that can’t be overlooked.

Let’s take a handful of blog entries compared with a 5,000 copy newsletter mailed out to your customers.

1 – Your web content will reach customers you didn’t even know existed, as well as the ones you knew about.

2 – Your best customers can share your web content with friends, family and coworkers with ease.

3 – You can fix your mistakes. If you’ve ever sent out a newsletter with a typo, you know how embarrassing that can be. With web content you can always go back and fix it easily.

4 – The cost of printing and mailing 5,000 newsletters, no matter how many corners you cut, is going to cost around $2,000. Web content, even with excellent design, top notch hosting and paid editorial content, will still cost a fraction as much.

5 – Instead of 5,000, you may have 5,000,000 readers, and the cost to you will remain the same.

6 – The long term effect of web content is tremendous. Unlike traditional marketing media that fades the minute it’s mailed, web content remains online for as long as you’d like it to. That means years from now you’ll still find that people are reading your content from today and even taking action based on it.

The cost, convenience, customer experience and long term benefits make it clear why almost 5% of small businesses have started publishing a business blog and why the number is growing every day.

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