Over the last year there’s been a massive increase in business blogging as businesses catch on to the idea that by creating a blog of their own, they can connect on a more personal level with their customers, who can directly respond to news and comment on new site features, involving the customer in an dialogue with the website and increasing the likelihood that they will return to the site.
Blogging also has the positive side effect of boosting a sites search engine ranking, as Google in particular loves regularly updated pages (automatic in a blog), fresh pages (again many blogs can be set to automatically create a new page each time a new post in created in a blog, and blogging around keyword related to your site will get you more search engine visibility, over time.
The size of the blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half, according to blog analysis firm Technorati.
Their analysis suggests that the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Other stats suggest that a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.
How to get a blog
Easy blogging setup can be achieved by getting an account at Blogger or at Microsoft’s spaces. Or you can use popular software such as my favorite Movable Type which is more flexible and configurable and so more capable of being optimised for search engines, as well as more easily adapted to look the way you want it to look.
Once you are up and running the key thing is to post to your blog, often. See my article Promote your blog for more information.