Here are just a couple of productive uses for The Flip:

1. Virtual Home Tours — Real estate agents could do a quick walk around a house with The Flip in hand, talking about the various features of the property.
2. Video Blogging – I plan to do some of this, if I don’t get overly camera shy, but like Darren does, you could talk briefly about your ideas and quickly get them up on your blog.
3. Man-On-The-Street Interviews – This could go for any other quick “on-the-spot” interview, like I’ve seen done in the past at conferences. Please the red record button and start asking questions.
4. Puppies and Kiddos – We don’t have kids, so I added in the puppies here, but as I’ve mentioned before, most events I’ve wanted to record are relatively short — say 5 minutes max — like my beautiful nieces and nephew running around and dragging me along for the ride.
5. Spot News – Weather is the category that comes immediately to mind here — tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, etc. — but also other “spot” news like, well, you can fill in that blank here.
6. Just Broadcast Yourself — With the handy YouTube upload feature included, you can broadcast you, your stupid human tricks and stunts and whatever else you want.

I’m sure there are a dozen more uses, but do you have more to suggest that I missed?

Answer: My blogs are one of my primary marketing tools for my business.

Through my blogs, and search engines, I seek to find new prospective customers for my various business products and services.

I don’t do any offline marketing (unless you count giving out business cards). So everything I do for my business is online.

And after almost two years of blogging, and learning about marketing online, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising and now, ecommerce best practices, I’ve found blogging to be one of the most cost effective (cheap) ways to help prospective customers to “know, like and trust” me …

Most business people want some kind of return on investment bottom-line figure, but it’s hard to put a number to what blogging does for my business. I do believe that if I stopped blogging, my business would not grow as fast …

Here’s four ways blogging helps my business:

1. Blogging puts a face to my business – I think people are more comfortable purchasing from someone they actually know, in some virtual way. Brian is a testament of this. His customers follow him almost like a fan club. And I think they buy because they like and trust him.
2. Blogging helps new customers find me, or vice versa — I’m thinking more in terms of finding new customers through the search engines here.
3. Blogging demonstrates my expertise in my business field — My hope is by blogging things like this post, those who have been hanging around my blog, but never bought from me or communicated with me, also see that I know what I’m talking about.
4. Blogging is my way of educational marketing — I try to be a practical blog writer and give readers something they can use in their businesses. I enjoy teaching through blogging. And my goal is to teach people how to use my products and services in a way that’s valuable to them even if they don’t buy from me though.