If you wanted to talk with someone who had been blogging a long time as a way to promote professional services, where would you go? David Maister’s blog would be a good place to start.

The other serious contender is Gautam Ghosh, who has been publishing his blog, gauteg.blogspot.com, from Hyderabad, India since 2003. Begun as a personal knowledge management tool, the blog soon morphed, as firms seeking technical talent began to source him.

He kept his day job until about a year ago, when a former client contacted him to see if he could help their project managers learn to use internal blogging as a vehicle to share knowledge. Gautam took the assignment and set up shop. He has generated several other leads directly through his blog, but none of them converted into paid work.

When I questioned Gautam about the value of blogging, which absorbs huge amounts of time and other resources, suggesting that marketing investments might be better made elsewhere, he responded:

People who read blogs are either bloggers themselves or a handful of others. Even so, blogging can be a powerful marketing vehicle. That’s because the search engines treat every post as a webpage. Google rates the blog pages higher than traditional ones, because the content changes more often and people link to it more often. The many linkages I have gives me a fairly high Google rating.

That rating makes it easy for people to find us, especially newspaper reporters. They call to interview me, resulting in quotes from me in the news media, and those quotes count for a lot here in India. Magazine editors have found me in the same way and asked for articles. I get speaking engagements in a similar fashion. All this goes well beyond India; I get global visibility.

Business has more or less come to me, and I because I am quiet and introverted I am more comfortable with people finding me. Somehow they do. They may not know my blog, but it is the main way I have achieved visibility. All else has flowed from that.

There is much to reflect on in Gautam’s example. The invisible hand of the market seems to be a term that applies well to blogging. It certainly works in invisible ways, leaving the value of blogging for marketing professional services strongly felt but still unproven.

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