If you really want to use your blog to get more business from online marketing, you might want to seriously consider the following:

1. Short – Write short snappy informative posts that make people curious
2. Personal – Be you, people like people who are honest
3. Easy to Find – Use directories, post to other people’s blogs and link from your main website
4. Commonplace – forget all the formalities and write as you would speak in the pub!
5. Interesting – So what makes your stuff interesting – slip in your unique value in a way to catch attention
6. Frequent – Keep doing it and do it often, people love new stuff
7. Interactive – Turn off moderation, allow people just express themselves – then you know what they think
8. Content – Make it real, with great content that adds value to the reader so they want to come back

A blog is basically a special website which enables you to publish a post (an article) as often as you like, with an option for readers to sign up and comment on the individual posts.

It’s highly interactive, and these days there are lots of free blog software and web space providers, such as Wordpress, Blogger etc.

For your companies it is a great way of “showing the friendly face” of their business to people and talking to them in less official way, while offering invaluable content. If done well, customers will read your blog regularly and they will keep coming back to your website. Who knows, they might even contact you one day and become your customers, because you will build relationship with them through your valuable blog posts.

Google and other search engines love blogs because they are updated regularly with fresh content and it is also a great way of building external links to your website. Here is the how-to:

1. Download Wordpress free at www.Wordpress.org and send it to your web designer who will upload it to the server, put a link to it to the website and give you the login details.
2. Login, pick a template, update your profile and start posting regularly.

Once your blog is up and running, you can post comments to other websites/blogs with your blog profile or with a link to your website. So aim at having your comments with a link to your website displayed on high ranking websites. Of course, don’t forget that, if possible, all links back to your blog should look like this:

<a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com/blog” title=”Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a>

Another way of promoting your blog is to submit its link to blog directories, which is very similar to normal web directories – and it’s free.

Click here to see a few most important blog directories where you definitely should submit your blog to.