Why Should Businesses Blog?
You hear a lot about business blogging these days. It seems everybody is extolling the virtues of the business blog. But up until now, I haven't seen anyone touch on all of the benefits of business blogging, not in a single article anyway.

So with this article, I've offer a comprehensive list of business blogging benefits.

1. Search Engine Visibility
By default, blogs do many things well that can help them earn search engine ranking. In many cases, business blogs can achieve solid ranking faster than regular websites. A blog is easier to publish than a regular website, so you can post content to it more often. Search engines like websites with frequently updated content. So through business blogging, a company can achieve better online visibility than with a website alone.

2. Easy Online Publishing
If you can create and send an email, you can post content to a blog. It's a simple matter of entering your content and clicking "Publish." This simplicity makes you more inclined to publish content regularly, which keeps people and search engines coming back more often.

This also makes business blogging ideal for multiple-author scenarios. The communications manager can control the business blog, but he or she can designate multiple authors with various levels of publishing authority -- and it's all easy to do.

3. Positioning Power
Blogs tend to be closely associated with an individual author, more so than a regular website. So if you make your business blog an extension of yourself, it becomes a readable manifestation of your knowledge, personality and professional talents. In this way, you can use your blog to position yourself as a "thought leader" in your industry.

This type of positioning can be useful for corporations, but it's even better for individual service providers, consultants and the like. By using a business blog over a period of time, for example, a consultant can build trust and demonstrate his or her long-term success.

4. Potential for Dialogue
Business blogs are part of the social web, often referred to as Web 2.0. Web publishing of yesterday was mostly a one-way affair in which the publisher spoke to the reader. Web publishing today is more of a dialogue, where publishers and readers speak to each other. With their reader commenting capabilities, blogs support the concept of online dialogue.

When used properly, business blogging can harness the power of this dialogue concept. Through a blog, companies can get feedback directly from their customer base. They can also win the "hearts and minds" of their base by offering candid insight and discussion related to their products or services.

5. Blogs Foster Trust
When you publish a blog in your own true voice, you encourage people to trust you. This is especially true when people read your blog over time -- when they become "fans" of your blog. You become less of a stranger and more of a trusted resource. Any company can benefit from appearing trustworthy, especially in this post-Enron world of corporate skepticism we live in.

6. Potential for Leads
You stand to gain a lot from the interaction and trust mentioned above. When you interact with your blog readers in a positive way, you have a much greater chance of turning them into readers, subscribers, customers and buyers.

7. Fill in the Blank
I said I would offer a comprehensive list of business blogging benefits. But in truth, such a list is impossible to create. With their versatility, blogs mean different things to different people. What value will you build into your business blog? There are no limits ... only possibilities and imagination.

* You may republish this article online if you retain the author's byline and at least one of the active hyperlinks below. Copyright 2007, Brandon Cornett.