Go for Free - use a blog to make part of your business “free”

If you haven’t read Chris Anderson’s latest idea-behemoth (ideahemoth?) Free in this month’s Wired, you should probably do yourself a favor and check it out.

If you’re too lazy to go read it now, here’s the important bit for what I’m talking about:

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

The essential idea is that the cost of thing on the internet is dropping to the point where those costs might as well be nothing.

This is especially true for blogging.

If you’re in a business where the cost of production is very real, and will remain very real (think: building lawnmowers), there’s no reason why you should offer your customers something for free that is not your primary product.

If you build lawnmowers, and you offer free, good advice about lawnmowers online, who do you think people will go to for their lawnmower needs? I bet you’re higher up the list.

The idea behind business blogging and marketing online is to establish expertise, so that when a need for your product or service arises (as it surely will), you are the person that your customer seeks out.