Not totally wrong, but way wrong about one thing.
Now, understand that Pete Caputa has introduced me to hundreds of people that paid me money. He’s not wrong about that. And Pete Caputa thinks that Hubspot is one of the most important investments that a business can make. He’s not wrong about that.
But…
Yesterday, a mutual business acquaintance left me a voice mail message. “Rick, I’m thinking about this Inbound Networking stuff and I’m trying to decide whether I should start a new, separate blog for my Inbound Networking Group or we should follow your lead and use our own blogs.” Pete is hand picking Hubspot Partners to start and lead groups and advising each group to start a “group blog”. That’s what he’s wrong about. (I’m waiting to see if I’m struck by lightning!)
Phew! Let me explain.
In Pete’s scenario, you get 6, 10, 20 people to pay a Hubspot partner a nominal monthly fee to direct and maintain the group and the new blog and all the members of the group post to this new blog and promote it through their social media channels. At some point, someone will leave the group. What are you gonna do, remove their posts? Unpromote their posts? What if the partner gets too busy and wants to move on? Plus, isn’t it more work for no reason?
My suggestion is that you get 2-3 people and join Inbound Networkers together. Then you each invite 2-3 people and get them to invite 2-3 people and if you do the math, you’ll realize that you now have the third generation gives you a minimum of 8 people in your group and the fourth generation could give you as many as 81 people in your group. Now, what do you say to get them to join with you? You say something like, “I think that you do good work and I think that you think that I do good work. There’s a new thing called Inbound Networking that combines the effectiveness personal referrals with the impact of social media and the internet and I was wondering if you wanted to try it out together?” Now, just pretend that you got to 81 people in your group and then somebody wrote a blog post on their own blog or answered a question on LinkedIn or tweeted and event and all 81 people retweeted or otherwise promoted that one thing. And imagine if all 81 of your members did something that you thought your followers should know about and all 81 members promoted all of it. Don’t you have quite a reach? One more thing. There’s already 84 members in the Inbound Networkers Group and will eventually be 20 sub-groups. There won’t be blogs for each sub-group because each sub-group’s members will be using their own footprint to grow each other’s and find new clients. What happens when you get members of 20 groups retweeting the remarkable content that your group members are creating? You’re not wasting your time growing traffic for a new blog, you’re growing your own traffic.
If you’d like info or to join Inbound Networkers, just click the link.
Still waiting for that lightning! 
BTW – If you’d like to attend an Inbound Networkers online meeting to see how it works, click that link.
RainMakers & Sales Rock Stars 
You’re right. I am definitely wrong.
Careful Rick, do you hear that sound? Like a vacuum, trying to suck up the dirt, but that has something stuck in it…. ;-)The biggest advantage I see is time. It’s going to take longer to build a new blog following and get inbound traffic for a brand new one versus one that has already been started.I tried this experiment on myself- as I tend to do before I recommend it to someone else to try. Guest blogging for other blogs that have more traffic than me has driven my traffic to my blog up over 20%. And it is much more fun too.
Is Pete Wrong? I think there is value from both sides of things. As Carole mentioned I try things myself often before I sell them to clients. I have done some guest post on other blogs, probably not enough, but we are working on that.However the other thing to keep in mind is getting people to do the things they need to do can be tough. I started a test group to see where it goes. This was started from scratch though because it was a different topic then my regular blog will be covering. I didn’t see the value of mixing the two ideas right now especially since I am trying to get others to participate. It seems easier getting people to buy into building something they are a part of instead of building my site since they do not see the benefit to them.I know there is a benefit when teams work together to build one another’s blogs and reach, but sometimes even this is hard for people to swallow.Lastly, the cross promotion of music to a ceo, may or may not be interesting/relevant. So I guess there could be a little hang up for an attorney to retweet an article about guerrilla marketing tactics. It will be fun to see where this stuff goes. I think for some only using your current blog will work well, but for others a new site might work but take more time to build the initial following. Honestly though skilled inbound marketers should be able to get this moving in the right direction if the passion, drive and commitment are there.