When a blog is not a blog

In the comments section of my recent post 5 musts of business blogging, Justin Brady asked a very interesting question.  He asked:

The answer…there are many great reasons to add a blog to your website, even if you don't really intend it to be a blog per se.  It's a strategy we employ all the time for our clients.  Let me show you a couple examples from the MMG client roster.

Mary Stier Connects (visit the site)

Mary Stier is the former President and Publisher of the Des Moines Register and was one of Gannett's youngest publishers.   She retired from the Register in 2007 and has now launched her own business, The Brilliance Group.  The vision for her new company is a lofty one — her profound passion is to bring the wisdom, strength and grace of women's leadership into the world. 

Mary's offerings include individual coaching, consulting, workshops for companies/organization, public speaking,and teaching some classes at the college level.

With Mary's site, we wanted to accomplish several goals including giving prospects a sample of how Mary thinks and inspires women.  We also wanted to organically impact the search engines.  So twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) Mary publishes a new blog post.

Her site's home page holds her three most recent posts and then her blog in its entirety is deeper in her site.  We wanted a very clean look for her site, so the only "bloggy" thing you'll see on her home page is subscribe links.

You can comment on her posts but other than that…it's kind of a non-blog blog.  We'll probably add a blogroll to her full blog, but other than that…we're keeping it very simple.

Shirley Poertner (visit the site)

Shirley is one of a select group of Master Trainers for Crucial Conversations® and Crucial Confrontations™ and Influencer.  All three training programs are based on New York Times bestselling books.   She works with corporations, associations and individuals — training them on the principles of these books.

Her website is the primary sales tool for her courses and she drives traffic there in a variety of ways.  Shirley is also on the blogging team at IowaBiz.

To get Google's attention and to keep her site's visitors engaged, we decided to re-publish one of her IowaBiz posts every month.   Hardly enough to call it a blog, but it serves our purposes.

Visitors to her site can subscribe to her home page's feed and can read the old posts by clicking on the archives but it's not really set up as a blog.

So that's the long answer to Justin's question.  There are many types of blogs, many reasons to blog and many ways to measure a blog's success.  In both Mary and Shirley's case — their blogs become a significant aspect of their brand and sales process.

How about you…know of some others?