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In what was originally a form of online journal keeping by stay-at-home moms and college students, it has now become a national phenomenon with its presence felt as a legitimate business booster. For the novices, blogs are online journals that are periodically updated with articles in the form of posts. It can serve as an informative vehicle between business and consumer. The possibilities are endless when it comes to its ability to draw customers. If your blog is full of valuable information, you will earn more traffic by retaining them. How?

1) Suppose your blog is based entirely on uncovering conspiracies from the JFK assassination. By creating a daily blog, you label yourself as an expert to the subject, which makes it easier to promote yourself all over the net. This builds more of a personal relationship between yourself and your site visitors, since it can come equipped with message boards and comment boxes where they can voice their opinion about anything you write. A sense of community is established, and people will want to visit again and again.

2) Search engines will give you a boost in the rankings if you have a blog added to your site. This is because blogs are frequently updated, and any fresh content will automatically trigger the search engine mechanisms to classify your site higher - generating more traffic. All it takes is 5 to 10 minutes of your daily time and search engine spide bots will keep reverting back to your site.

3) By adding a blog to your arsenal, you can submit it to the myriad of blog directories posted on the Internet. Some of them include Blog Catalog at blogcatalog.com, Blogarama (blogarama.com) and BlogsCanada.com which has a whopping selection of over 10,000 blogs.

Some of the better blog sites on the Internet include wordpress.com, blogger.com, and blogista.com. They have full HTML capabilities which allow you oto insert the page into your own website or direct to it if needed. I recommend using Blogger the most of all, since it costs absolutely nothing to get started with free hosting and you don't have to learn any fancy HTML or FrontPage to publish content to your site. Just write, and publish it to the Web for all to see.

About the Author

Ryan Smith is the owner of http://www.LearnToBulk.com/ and founder of Promotion Academy, which offers written lessons, videos, and other resources. Find out more at http://www.PromotionAcademy.com