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Guest post by: Sean Hecking Become an Author

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Blogs, short for web log, have been used to share thoughts on everything from cooking recipes to investment advice. Only in recent years have businesses and marketing professionals begun to take advantage of blogs as a tool to both educate and build a relationship with customers. As any other tool available to marketers, a blog must be used with caution. Blogging communities value highly the straight forward conversational nature of blogs and will dismiss anything that smells of blatant sales attempts.

Blogging is really a quite simple, low cost and easy process to begin. Simply by going to a blog hosting service, such as http://www.blogger.com or http://www.typepad.com, you can get started in minutes. If you have IT folks in house with a little HTML knowledge, they can get a blog set up so that it will appear as though it exists within your web site. I recommend the latter approach, since this is where the true SEO benefit exists. Pick someone within the organization, a subject matter expert, not necessarily the company President, that can give more of a front lines perspective.

Post about topics relevant to your customers or industry. Pick topics that are timely and gain credibility in your specific market niche. Post as often as you can, consistency also is a best practice. (often can be anywhere from once a week to five times a day) Use terms customers use to describe your products or services. (some of these terms can be found in web analytics tracking tools, which is a different article) Best practices in search engine optimization also apply to blogs.

Keeping your company web site updated every other day can be a daunting task. Blogs keep search engines coming back to your web site by providing fresh, relevant content. Relevant content helps raise your overall search visibility for key phrases. Blogs create a conversational dialog with your customers that builds their trust. When customers perform a search, they are more likely to use the same conversational language (found in your blog) to describe your business and services. Blogs also build pages and pages of web site copy available to search engines and your customers to link to, write about, comment on or forward to their friends.

Once you start blogging, stay committed and have patience. It could take weeks or even months to see results from your efforts. Over time, your blog will become a key marketing tool in reaching new customers and recruiting talent for your business.

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