Everyone these days say you need a blog, especially if you’re in business. If you’re a small business a blog can be a great way of connecting with customers and pushing out information to them. Also, the nature of a blog platform, also makes it easy for your content to get found by people and search engines. A blog is fairly simple and inexpensive to set up, so setting up a blog can take a fraction of the time it takes to set up a full blown website – and it can still look pretty professional. Blogs, since they are often updated can even take the place of a company email, which often get buried in an email inbox or caught up in a spam filter.

But there is one caveat with a blog – in order to do it’s job well, it needs to updated frequently. You can talk about your products and services, industry news and even had a bit of personal color. The tone of a blog is generally friendlier and casual than a company website. Since most blogs support comments, customer can even ask questions on a post, making it easy to engage in a dialogue – and answering sales questions in real time – just be sure to answer them.

A blog isn’t substitute for a company website – especially if you offer ecommerce. Blogs for the most part don’t do shopping carts, inventory management or handle shipping and tax calculations that well. Also detailed product specs probably won’t work as well with the more casual log format, but you might be able to bud buzz for an upcoming product launch using a blog – revealing bits and pieces of the whole over a series of posts to build people’s anticipation.

Also blogging takes work – a good blog is updated several times a week and if you truly want a lot of traffic, you will need to spend time marketing your blog – time that might be spent directly marketing your products or your business. No a blog, in many cases should be thought of as an indirect marketing tool for many established product or service companies.

But make no mistake, a blog can be a powerful tool for a smaller company on a budget – it can give your company real personality and it can be an excellent low cost way to market your company. Is a blog right for your business? Only you can decide – and sometimes the only way to know is to try it – but be sure to commit to it fully for a period of time – six months or so. Also you should decide on some goals for your blog – do you want it to build your email list (make sure you add an email capture box to your blog) increase product awareness, or jump start sales. Your goals will dictate the content of your blog and how you use it.

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