Remember the conversation from the 1987 Hollywood Classic, Wall Street, when Lou tells Bud — “The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do”.

I think I better rephrase it to — “The main thing about blogging is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do”.

While I could go on the reasons why blogging is all that great (and I will do that in another post). But, over the years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve learnt about a few negative effects blogging can have on you –

1. You Change Priorities. You start your blog as a place to jot your thoughts and rant about things. Then you find that people are reading what you write. So, you start writing more. The more your readers, the more you blog. All of sudden you are spending more time on your blog than your main business / job.

2. You Blog for Blogging’s Sake. You read somewhere that the most famous bloggers make 5-6 posts a day and if you want to join the A-List, you also need to spit out posts at that rate.

Here’s a fact for you — Most A-Listers have Blogging as their Full Time Profession and they have nothing else to do but blog. You can match their number too, but you will need to put in the same kind of effort that they do. See Point #1.

3. You Listen TOO Much to Your Commentators. Blogs comments are a wonderful thing - you can get instant feedback from your readers. However, all our internal statistics on our website network show that less than 5% people post comments on a post.

If you listen too much to your commentators and start shaping your blog according to their suggestions then you are focusing on just 5% of your audience — some of who are just compulsive commentators.

It is easy to ignore the 95% who never pester you with negative remarks but you should not forget that they are your major audience. And, they read your blog only because they like what you are doing!

Another post which I am working on is 10 Wonderful Things that a Blog can do for Your Business. But till then, don’t make the three blogging mistakes I pointed out above. You want your blog to complement and grow your business, not the other way round.

If there is a marketing topic which generates some really hot debates then it is — Does Sex Sell. I wouldn’t get into the actual debate itself but rather give you two cases and let you decide for yourself.

Anne’s Experience: The last person I heard talking about it was Marketing Sherpa’s Anne Holland. According to some research they did on their website, and here is what they found –

In every single instance when a female face was above the fold on a homepage, both the male and female executives in our lab spent time looking at her. Men’s faces didn’t get nearly the same level of attention.

But is that a good thing? According to Anne, no it isn’t. And the reason is that you are getting their attention at wrong place.

In other words, yes, businesspeople, male and female, alike will absolutely look at a beautiful woman. But, that look could be distracting eyes from the copy and hotlinks more important to your business. So, you’re getting attention in the wrong place.

One B-to-B marketer actually tested the “does sex sell?” concept for a lead generation campaign MarketingSherpa gave an award to last year (see link below.) Results: a cheerful male model got 53% more responses than a beautiful female model.

Shoe’s Story: One of the better known Internet Marketers, Jeremy Shoemaker A.K.A ShoeMoney, did an experiment by comparing the results of a different strategy than what another Internet Marketer Andy Beal was doing.

Andy was running a contest offering people a chance to win a Microsoft Zune if they added him on an online community called MyBlogLog. Shoe, on the other hand, did nothing more than use the picture of a hot chick as as online avatar.

Results? On 7 Jan, Andy had 143 Members and ShoeMoney had 233 Members!

The above two examples clearly show that if you are looking for action response, then it may not be such a good strategy. However, as far as generating buzz is concerned, nothing can beat this strategy. =)