Exploring readers’ perception of professional blogs

Abstract

This explorative study is focused on blog readers who read or follow professional and personal blogs. The purpose of this research is to investigate how blog readers perceive and anticipate both blogs in general and professional blogs. In particular, the main interest of the research is to investigate the influence of monetising activities in blogs on authenticity of the blog authors and credibility of their blogs. The insights into the motivations and attitudes of the readers demonstrate the need of best practices on finding the balance between monetisation and self-presentation of the authors in their blogs. This study reveals a few issues that should serve as a motivation for the future research in the field of professional blogging.