I have committed one of the worst sins in the blogging world there is…I haven’t blogged on this site for over six months.

Ridiculous!

Horrifying!

What was I thinking?!!

Guess what…it was an experiment.  I wanted to see what happened when I left a blog to just “be” for a long period of time, completely unattended, uncared for, and lost.

Consider what would happen to a beautiful rose plant, you put it in a gorgeous pot, you use the best potting soil, you fertilize it, you water it, you weed it, (for a few days) and then life happens, you get busy, and you FORGET you have a rose plant out there on the patio, and whether the temperatures are cold, blowing, and freezing, or they’re hot, still, and drying…the same result occurs…

…the rose plant dies.

I checked my site stats…let’s have a recap here…I started this blog in November 2010, and I posted a total of fourteen posts, my last one toward the end of December…so I didn’t even blog for two full months.

As you can see from the following table, I had about 40 hits  for November, December, January, February, and March…and then things really tumbled…until I got to, well…FIVE! in June 2011.  Six months and my blog is virtually dead!

What this tells me is that you can’t just start a blog, put up a few articles (even if they’re REALLY, REALLY great articles) and expect anything to happen.  I have my Twitter account connected, and that seems to continue to grow slowly (very slowly) because I’ve let that go as well just to see what happened…but the hypothesis has been proved.

I think we all knew it…we just needed the proof.

There you have it, folks. Your blog is an excellent marketing tool, ONLY IF YOU USE IT!!!!!

I’ll be working with one of our local Chambers of Commerce, talking about this very topic…teaching small biz owners how to promote their own business.  Everything I cover with that group, I’ll be posting here for everyone to learn from.

Hey, this is going to be a really GREAT ride folks.  Stick around and prepare to take notes that will take your business to the next level.

Until then,

~Kit Birmingham