Blogging is not simply a tool for computer whizz kids, it is an effective business tool that is used by an increasing number of corporate’s to drive new business.

Max Worton, a search engine marketing consultant at Web Efforts (www.webefforts.co.uk) explains the 10 ways that a blog can be used to drive new business:-

1. Community Building
   As you write on your specialist area you will start to build up a subscribed base of readers. These readers will no doubtably be your target audience, and will probably want to get in touch with you to talk about more things.
2. Competitive Positioning
   If you had a minute to tell your customers how you are different, wouldn’t that be great. However, how do you buy a minute of their time. You will write useful articles in your blog! Show them good work, and they will want to know more about you.
3. Brand Building
   You could pay thousands of pounds to put your brand in front of someone, but why not use the spare capacity in your team to build a blog, and get your branding for free.
4. Search Engine Marketing
   Search Engine’s like Google continually spider the internet with automated robots that look for new and fresh content. This new information is being continually  indexed by their system, and the more pages that get indexed by Google, the greater  chances of your pages appearing on the search engine.
5. Industry Positioning
   In business, we really want to be dealing with industry experts. If you are an expert, tell the world on your blog. Just remember, finding experts isn’t easy, think about how long it took to build up your contacts.
6. Manage your reputation
   Have you been misquoted? Is there a rumour about your business?  Do you have a ways of dealing with any negative press? With a blog you do. This is a good way to manage your online reputation.
7. Building Relationships
   1-2-1 selling must be the most powerful medium, because there’s lots of interaction. On the web you can achieve this interaction by creating blogs that allow a 2 way communication using the ‘comment on article’ function.
8. Publicity
   You can now pay for publicity on the internet, which means you can guarantee traffic to your blog. All you need to do is post your best article, and your blog can be attracting visitors in days.
9. Viral Marketing
   Social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook, as well as social bookmarking sites like digg and delicious can produce incredible results. All you need to do is post a successful press release on these sites in the right areas. If a press release goes ‘viral’ your blog will get a surge in subscribers and possibly attract some very high quality customers.
10. Low Cost
    Yes, one of the most tempting points of all, setting up a blog isn’t expensive. Just ask us.

I am sure there are more benefits that I have missed off. If you can think of some more, please post them below :-