The more I encourage small businesses and large to consider blogging as anotner marketing tool, the more I realize people don’t realize what makes an appropriate blog topic. Just today I spoke with someone who planned to use their new blog to talk about their business in a self-promoting way. Uh, no.

Your blog, should you choose to blog, should be like your email newsletter: relevant and useful, not blatantly promotional. Also like an email newsletter, it should help to promote your brand, but in an indirect way (what I fondly refer to as indirect marketing).

To market with blogs, don’t write about your business, but write around it. If you own an Indian restaurant, write about Indian food, culture, why your ingredients are homemade, the history of different dishes, how to pair dishes in a meal, etc. Educate and inform, but don’t promote. If, however, you have added a new menu item or you have a special event coming up at your restaurant, by all means promote it in your blog. But by then you’ve developed a relationship with readers and earned their trust and they’ll know that even if the information is about your Indian restaurant specifically, it’s still relevant and useful.

P.S. When I first wrote about “indirect marketing” back in April, 2005, searching for that term in Google got you only 6,950 results. Today, not quite three years later, you get 23,200 results. The term is catching on!! As is the idea, I hope!