What is a blog?

Think about a news website. All of their news is written into different articles. It's all on separate pages. And people can comment on it.

A blog is very similar. You post articles and they appear on pages for people to read and comment on. For an individual, it's a way of posting their opinions. For a business, it's a way of putting your business in the spotlight on the internet.

(What you're reading is a blog by the way)

What could we use a blog for?

• Articles on what your business is currently up to – a good way of showing case studies online.
• Expressing opinions or work ethics of your business' industry – discuss the current issues in your industry.
• Getting user responses to ideas you want to put forward to them.
• Give your business an active voice.

Benefits of blogging

Blogging is important to your business for many reasons but here are three of the more important ones to help you understand why a blog will be a benefit to you.

The first reason is that the search engines love blogs.  Blogs provide fresh content to meet the demands of information thirsty Internet searchers.  Most blogs are updated at least one time per week (ideally) and even as often as every day.  A good blog should be updated at least every three days to keep the search engines coming back.  The blog that you write should have content relating to what your business has to offer and how it can benefit your target audience.

The second reason why blogging is important to your business is the fact that a good blog with updated, quality information and the right keywords, will drive a good deal of free (aka organic) traffic to your web site.  When you provide a link to your main web site, a blog can drive traffic to it as well giving you double exposure.

Without traffic, neither your blog nor your web site would have much exposure on the Internet.  Without free traffic, your business will be spending quite a bit of money on advertising to wind up at the top of the search engine pages.  In fact, your blog may be the best in the world, but if it is on the last page of Google, no one will know your blog exists. You are either going to pay for getting that traffic or build your blog the right way from the start to get high rankings in the free organic search engines.

The third reason is that a blog can be started for free or very low cost.  Businesses are cutting expenses these days due to the fluctuations in the economy.  Advertising costs are being slashed.  There isn't a better way to advertise on the Internet then by building a blog that has great content and keywords and as a result, drives free traffic to it.  A blog can become your company's best source of free advertising.

What should I write in a blog?

Search Engine Spiders (little critters that crawl the internet for content to assign to a website) follow hyperlinks that you put on a page. They can assign the content around that hyperlink to the new page. So why not write specific blog posts about sectors of your company, and then leave a hyperlink back to that page on your main website – increasing the chance of the page you linked to being found in a search engines by increasing the keyword pool (words from your article). Very simply: words you write in a blog post will be seen as terms to return search results for on google for the page you've linked to.

Finally, keep your blog updated regularly.  Link it to your web site.  Submit your URL to directories and other free services available on the Net for even more free exposure.  Make blogging a priority for your business and you'll reap the rewards.

There are many more reasons why blogging is important for your business but these three reasons alone should give a company or small business reason to get started with building a blog for free right away.  There is no excuse not to get started now.