Blogging for your business is worth it even if you get no traffic

I guess I'm old fashioned but I almost never look at video blogs...for informational value anyway. It might be a great way to communicate the personality/likability of the blogger, but it seems like a really inefficient way to communicate ideas compared to static graphics and well-formatted text.

Imagine if HN were a discussion board filled with youtube embeds for web-cam comments.

If you do a video, make sure it's relevant to your content. If all your video is of you talking - then imho it's a fail. As a visitor, the last thing I want to do is have to sit through a video stream which imparts no additional value beyond that which I would have got reading a transcript, and worse, I'm forced to listen at the speed of the speaker, rather than read at my speed.

The other problem with video is that it makes it very difficult to follow the idea that the article author mentions which is release early and then edit/polish later. Some people can present to a camera off-the-cuff and come across polished and succinct. Most can't however and tend to ramble, waffle, make terrible jokes or um and ahh to buy thinking time. Those types of unedited videos are painful to watch.

Which is not to say I disagree with Dan - I agree that video blogging is an untapped opportunity - I feel it's untapped because too many people think they just need to record an unedited 'on-the-fly' conversation or monologue and that constitutes a good video. Until people appreciate that you need to spend more effort on video to get the same quality of blog post as a 'text post', I think video will remain untapped.

Hey Ray, thanks. I've tried chartbeat, gosquared, and google's realtime. They're all fine, but now I mostly just get it via twitter.

It's not "analytics" per se, but the first 10 minutes worth of retweets is a better indicator of whether a post has legs or not than anything else.

With the proper realtime tools, I would basically just watch for irregular spikes after I pushed a post. The actual numbers never really mattered.

A quick SMS saying the post was doing better than 80% of my other posts would do the trick too.

Hey JS, I think you've got two fallacies baked into your perspective.

First, that blogs have to be unprofessional. That's simply not true -- for more "serious" industries, you can treat the content like mini-whitepapers or slices of a conference presentation.

Second, that non-technical people can't appreciate and share good content. They can, although it goes through email rather than rss. If you provide the mini-report and analysis which helps someone win an intra-management dispute, you're going to have an evangelist forever.

The less your industry does it already, the more value I see in you breaking the mould. Which supplier are you going to pick up the phone and call? The one you've heard very highly of, or the one whose report you just spent the morning poring over?