Last updated on October 8th, 2010 at 06:31 pm

What is a blog?
Simply put, a blog (originally called a weblog) is an online diary. It’s just another way to publish information. It’s a space where the author (often called a ‘blogger’) can easily publish a wide variety of content to the web. Entries are typically short and informal and are often posted daily although this varies between several times a day though to once a week or even less often.

Having said that a blog is an online diary there are many business sites that use the blogging system as part of their website (this article for example is published using the Forest Software blog). There are several reasons for using a blog on your business website, these include ease of use, speed of updating, automatic cross linking of posts although there are some drawbacks such as not being easy to maintain things like the meta information without “plug-ins” to the blog system.
How can I use a blog as a marketing tool?

The main reasons that many business people use the Internet are researching information, finding answers and making contacts.  A blog can aid this process by containing fresh information about your business and increasing your online networking opportunities. Having a business blog can also be a good way for your customers to communicate with you, as well as between themselves, using comments to your posts.

Although blogging can be fast, low cost and offers a highly effective publishing, marketing and content management tool before adding ‘blogging’ to the marketing mix, you should be sure you are clear why you’re blogging and what you want to get out of it.  For example :-

• Do you want to be able to publish news articles quickly to let customers know about trends or new products?
• Do you want your customer’s views about certain matters?
• Do you want to encourage communication between customers and your business?
• Do you want to encourage communication between your customers? Remember that this may not always be a good thing as it gives customers that have a problem (real or imagined) a channel to publish their views that can be read and commented on by other customers and prospects.  The author has read many blogs where news is announced only for the business to be ripped apart by comments saying how poor the service is. 
• Do you want other bloggers to be quoting your blog and spreading the news about your company?

Once you have decided to include blogging in your marketing mix there are two further things to consider.

Will you have the time to publish posts on a regular basis – there is nothing worse than looking at a business blog that had its last entry several months ago.  Personally I would aim to make a posting at least once every couple of weeks and if you can manage more often than that all the better.  The author or this article tries to publish something once a week although some weeks there are two or three posts and other weeks there are none.

Where will the blog be hosted?  There are two main options here, you can self  host the blog (like the Forest Software one you are reading) or you can sign up for a free account with someone like WordPress, Blogger or one of the other sites that hosts the blog for you.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these options (both from the marketing and SEO point of view) and these will be examined in a further article that we have published titled “Self Hosted V Off Site Blogs“.

Remember, it is not only large companies that can benefit from a blog. Companies of all sizes can find that blogs are a useful tool.  The key to success when blogging for your business is to pick the areas in your business where blogs can solve communication problems, be it communicating with new prospects or existing clients.  With many blogs reaching hundreds, if not thousands, of people daily it is time for blogging to be taken seriously in the marketing mix.