New figures confirm what smart online marketers already knew:  Blogging has become a huge marketing tool, one no business person can afford to ignore.  And blog surveys give you a way to “stand out in the pack” by engaging your audience and building that all-important bond with your customers and prospects

The numbers tell us 2 important stories:  about the explosion of bloggers and, even more important for marketers, the enormous growth in blog readers.

Although estimates vary, the estimates are that nearly 28 million Internet users have blogs that they update at least monthly; that’s about 14% of the population of Internet users.  Projections tell us that by 2013–just 4 years from now–the number could rise to 37.6 million bloggers.

Looking at the other side of the picture, some estimates put the number of Internet users who read blogs at least once a month at 96.6 million.  That’s a LOT of traffic.  By 2013, that number could reach 128 million people.  That would could mean that 58% of  Internet users read blogs.

As the author of a new report on blogging states,“Blogging activity presents new opportunities for marketers to monitor and influence conversations relevant to their businesses,” says Mr. Verna. “Opportunities no marketer should ignore.”

And if you’re running one or more blogs–as you should be–blog surveys give you a wonderful way to generate content, draw traffic, and produce buzz on your blog.  Find out how.

We’re getting ready to do a video on blog surveys and we want to make sure we’re giving you all the information you need.

So let’s hear it:  What are your questions about doing blog surveys?  Anything, from what software to use to what to ask to how to interpret blog surveys is fair game.

Post your questions here and I promise to answer them.  And, if you want to tell us about experiences you’ve had using blog surveys–successes, problems, funny stories, whatever–we’d love to hear them.

The video will be up on the blog soon, so stay tuned!

The new Kauffman Entrepreneurship Survey results show just how strongly Americans support entrepreneurship and view it as the backbone of our economy.

And a blog survey on the same topic is a great way to “piggyback” the popularity of those data.

Not only will your blog survey get people coming to your blog to take it, the blog survey results will give you something to use to generate buzz about your blog.

Anytime you can link survey results like these to original data you collect from YOUR peeps–like what you get from a blog survey–that’s great fodder for social media and even the press.  It can REALLY help you generate traffic.

You can do this 2 ways.

Here’s an example of the first way:  One of my clients just finished a survey of her list that included some questions on attitudes about the economy.  Lucky for her:  She can take these Kauffman results, link them to her results, and she’s got a gold mine.

By showing how the national data connect with what HER list members think,

• She’s got something awesome to talk about in her blog and newsletter, something that will interest people and generate comments;
• She’s got something to talk about in Twitter, on Facebook, and in other social networking sites;
• She can write lenses for Squidoo and articles for HubPages and Ezine Articles;
• She can bookmark all that in social bookmarking sites;
• Because her survey was sound and done scientifically, she can even write a press release describing how her results relate to the findings from a national survey.

That’s a LOT of return from 1 little block of questions in a survey.

But you can profit from this too, right now, by using the second way of connecting with national survey data:

Do a blog survey, asking what YOUR peeps think about entrepreneurship and the economy.  Here are some examples of questions you can use for your blog survey, taken right from the Kauffman survey:

Even though Wall Street has collapsed, I still believe in capitalism centered around entrepreneurs.  Response options:  Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree.

How important are entrepreneurs for the health of the US economy?  Response options:  Very important, somewhat important, not very important.

How important are entrepreneurs for creating jobs in the United States?  Response options: Very important, somewhat important, not very important.

And you can do this easily.  Although I don’t like Poll Daddy for doing big surveys (because last time I checked, they weren’t encrypting their data), you can get a free account at Poll Daddy to put a blog survey on your website.

A blog survey like this is a great way to get the conversation going and generate comments.

You can also do a quick poll at LinkedIn or Facebook.

So do a blog survey today–start asking your peeps what they think and reporting the results!

Blog surveys, e-mails, interactions on Facebook, and other forms of social media provide WONDERFUL ways to hold a conversation with your customers and to court potential customers.  In our opinion, EVERYONE in business should be implementing a social media strategy.

But social media and blogs can’t provide a systematic picture of your customer base or your target market.

Let’s think for a minute about who is most likely to post on your blog or fill out a survey there, to send an e-mail to you, to communicate with you on your Facebook group:  It’s typically the customers who are most motivated.

That means you’re most likely to hear from customers who feel strongly, one way or the other–often, customers who either love your products or hate them!  Clearly, that won’t provide a balanced view of what your customers think, as a whole.

It also won’t give you an accurate picture of who your customer are. We’ve talked about the importance of understanding your customers’ characteristics, because such traits as their age, their gender, their level of education, and their income have been shown to affect the kind of products and services they buy.

So let’s think about this issue for a minute, in relation to a blog survey or social media.  Here, too, you’re likely to get a very skewed picture if you rely solely on these methods of gathering information.

For example, although the age range of people who use social media is increasing dramatically, it’s still skewed toward younger users.  So you’re far less likely to hear from older custoners on a blog survey than you are to hear from your younger ones.

That means you can’t accurately estimate the age range of your customers from a blog survey.  But it also means much more than that.  It means that, if the views of older customers differ from those of their younger counterparts–as they do on most issues–you’re going to get a skewed picture of EVERY attitude and behavior you measure.

This illustration shows you, then, why blog surveys and other forms of social media are limited in their ability to give you accurate information about your customer base.

Should you do blog surveys?  Absolutely.  Poll widgets and other mechanisms for conducting surveys on your blog CAN tell you about what blog readers think (at least it tells you what the people who chose to respond think).  More importantly, it gives them a voice, another way to communicate with you.

The ideal strategy is to engage in an ongoing conversation with your customers through blog surveys, through other social media activities, AND through surveys.  Each of these elements provides a unique aspect of the ongoing communication with your market.