I ran across an interesting story in this week's BusinessWeek - Paul Purdue, the CEO of the (now bankrupt) iFulfill.com, started blogging as the company got itself into trouble - and it sounds like he was far more worried about generating buzz from his blog than he was about the business:

Purdue launched his blog in May with hopes that it would strengthen ties with customers. Perhaps the blog would even draw in new customers - if only more people would read the thing. At one point, a frustrated Purdue asked his marketing consultant, a blogger named B. L. Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, how to attract readers. She recalls relaying a tip that long ago had been given to her - "create a scandal".

Now, clearly that's not what this guy set out to do - but it sounds like he spent way, way too much time worrying about attracting readers. I get asked about attracting readers - and I have a very simple answer: "Be interesting, but be patient".

It's taken me 3 years to get to the level of traffic I have now (between 5000 and 7000 pageviews a day), which I consider fairly decent for a non-political blog). I don't fret over what to write; I see things that interest me as they come by. If that interests readers, or gets links, that's great - if not, well, tomorrow's another day.

There's been a fair amount of talk about blogging in some of the marketing rags I read too - and they focus on things I consider to be utterly irrelevant - SEO tricks, tracking readers, that kind of thing. If I'm doing my job, I'm creating some increased level of interest in Cincom Smalltalk simply by posting, and interested parties will download the non-commercial product. At some point, some of them will buy a license from us. Attempting to relentlessly track them (for what - email blasts they won't want to hear?) is only going to tick them off.

We are well into demand led buying, where prospects find things that interest them and contact a company in order to acquire them. In a landscape filled with iPods and TiVos, the last thing people want is some gosh forsaken "targeted" marketing campaign. Far better to engage them in a conversation, and have them contact you because they want to. Purdue missed that aspect of business, and I think it cost him.