I just spent 3 days at BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. This year was by far the biggest: more people, more speakers, more presentations, more parties...
The opening keynote was delivered by Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati, and he shared tidbits from the brand new State of the Blogosphere 2009 released today (here's link to presentation). The report is released over five days and today is focused on: Who Are the Bloggers?
Overall, bloggers are a highly educated and affluent group. Nearly half of all bloggers we surveyed have earned a graduate degree, and the majority have a household income of $75,000 per year or higher. As blogging is now firmly a part of the mainstream, we see that the average blogger has three or more blogs and has been blogging for two or more years. We are also noticing an ever-increasing overlap between blogging and mainstream media.
9% of respondents to the professionally produced survey, are self-employed and 70% of those say they blog about their business and are blogging more now than when they started.
Professional bloggers (including self-employed) stated the following benefits of blogging (reinforces everything I've been telling you for the last 5 years!):
- 71% have greater visibility in their industry
- 63% said clients have purchased products and services
- 56% say their company is now regarded as a thought leader
- 40% asked to speak at conferences
What's not to like about that? It doesn't matter what the industry is, either. So, if you're not blogging for your business, let's talk! If you are and you don't feel you're getting the most bang out of your blog, let's do a blog review and see where you can tweak and improve to get much better results. Business blogging works...you don't have to take my word for it. Take the words of the 2900 bloggers in 50 countries who responded to the survey.
By the way, you can see some of my pictures from BlogWorld on my Posterous site.
