I have to admit, when I first heard about blogging, I basically thought “what’s the big deal? I have been doing this for years on bulletin boards”. It didn’t really hit me until I checked out Word Press’s functionality (props to my boy Matt for creating such a great program!). I believe blogging these days is just about as important to do as owning a website. Not just for your customers but for your employees as well. Your blog needs to be used as a communication tool to keep both your customers and employees informed.Currently, my company uses Word Press for 3 different blogs. We have one called Digital Marketing Blog, one called Product Updates Blog and one for our press releases/news articles.

• Digital Marketing Blog: There are 5 of us at mobileStorm that write on a constant basis about topics ranging from email marketing design, law, and best practices as well as mobile, multi-channel, and digital marketing.
• Product Updates Blog: We are constant developing and adding new features to our platforms. As soon as we launch, we not only list the features but also their importance, areas they affect, how long they took to build and who was responsible for the creation, development, management and testing of the feature. We even include photos of the employees involved.
• Press releases: If you list press releases on your site, you will love to use Word Press to manage this. We always use to build it by hand but we can easily post new releases. We get all of the benefits of a blog such as categories, date listings, calendar, RSS feeds and sociable links.

Below are the main reasons why you need to start blogging right away if you haven’t already:

1. Blogging makes you an expert: If you are a business providing a service, you need to show everyone that you are an expert so they continue to give you their business. Posting articles about your ideas and thoughts on your market is a great way to do this.
2. Blogging brings you traffic: Type in “newsletter promotions” into Google. Check out the first two links, cool huh? Search Engines realize that blogs are constantly being updated with information. Most likely you will start to write about your industry and if the content is relevant, you will come up high in the natural rankings when someone is searching for you. Since we started blogging, our website traffic and leads have skyrocketed.
3. Blogging gives you distribution: All blogs come with RSS feeds so that people can subscribe to your blog and get updates through their RSS reader. Likewise, blogs like Word Press have very cool plugins for social bookmarking like Digg, and Readit. You can choose which social links you want to show up on your page. If people like your article, they will book mark it which in turn helps you get more traffic and makes your site more relevant.
4. Blogging creates relationships: Every time you post an article, you are speaking directly to your audience. It’s real-time and hopefully on a daily or weekly basis. Each post allows someone to reply and comment on what you wrote, giving everyone a voice. This creates a community and allows you to build closer relationships with your audience. This not only goes for clients and potential clients, but employees as well.
5. Blogging gives you real-time results: You can sit back and watch how effective your blog actually is with Word Press’s Fire Stats plug in. You can view how many people visit your blog, geographic breakdowns, as well as how they found you (search engine etc..). You can also use Feedburner to allow people to subscribe so that every time a new article is posted, they are alerted.
6. Blogging can make you money: It’s possible if you get a large enough readership base to insert adsense into your blog, allowing you to be a publisher for Google and to earn revenue.

I am sure there are even more reasons, so if you have any I would love to hear them. Hey look, I am giving you a voice! Blogging is already working for me. Now if I could just get enough readers to start making money with adsense….