Your website and your blog is the central communications hub for your message, ideas and communication. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are only more means to get traffic to your site and expose more people to your company, your mission, your voice and engage with them, after you wrote something. You have to deliver relevance content and "Feed the Beast" - a play on words, as all the connections with the Interwebs are handled via feeds and apis... Share you knowledge and you will be ahead of the curve and much more visible to the world, then 90% of your competition.
And Blog engines, self-hosted or shared hosted have the best features to "Feed the Beast". And you can measure, what is the current interest of your growing readership. Measure it, not to get frustrated but to focus your topics more to your audience. Google Analytics helps a great deal and it's free.

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A common mistake people make is that people live in a “field of dreams” world whereby they think that simply blogging about a subject will make people come and visit. Blogging is great for telling prospects about what you are selling but it does not bring people to your site.

In fact a blog is a focal point and acts as a base of operations for communications. Even though you may use Twitter and Facebook there still needs to be landing point – a place that people end up when they click on the link.

What’s more a blog can also address questions or concerns your audience find important. By all means people use amplification tools like Twitter and Facebook to draw their attention to your blog post, but the thoughts reside in one place.

SEO is also vital. New, focussed and relevant content will always be picked up by Google which will in turn bring extra traffic. It is here where the second stage of engagement takes place – directly on the blog. This is often more in-depth and focussed than through other channels like Twitter. How often have we all felt that 140 characters is not enough to give a detailed opinion. Facebook too has its limitations – even though you can write as much as you like, many find lengthy wall posts unappealing – it really is a case of the right message for the right channel. Read more at technobabble2dot0.wordpress.com

For those starting out or thinking about blogging, you probably have a few ideas, but you also need to look into the future, 2 - 3 times a week blogging that 100 - 150 Blog posts per year... An all should be relevant to your audience? Phew, seems like a taunting task... You know how to eat an elephant? Right? Once bite at a time or one blog post at a time;-)

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Wisdom aside, in an attempt to give you a generous dose of inspiration, I thought that I’d purvey my own thoughts with regards to what makes a good blog that people will remember, re-post, retweet and, most importantly, return to again and again. Read more at socialmediatoday.com

Very much looking forward to the discussion. Join me and fellow SBRN members on January 20, 2011

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The Southwest Florida Small Business Resource Network will address blogging in relation to social media marketing at "The Best" series event Jan. 20 at Holiday Inn Fort Myers Airport at Town Center. Attendees will learn tips and tools for blogging and the benefits of it. Guest speaker is Birgit Pauli-Haack of Pauli Systems, an expert in the field of Web strategy, Web development and Web 2.0 integration. The event, sponsored by Florida Gulf Coast University's Small Business Development Center, is from 5:30-7 p.m. at 9931 Interstate Commerce Drive in Fort Myers. Registration is required by Monday at sbdcseminars.org. The cost is $15 for members, or $20, which includes refreshments. Following the presentation is the network's monthly "Network After Five" social event, where members exchange ideas for growing their businesses. Read more at www.news-press.com