It's rare these days to encounter someone that disputes the importance of a web presence. The benefits are obvious, it's the first place people look for information and after your initial investment it requires very little to keep relevant and updated and you've got a virtual sales person operating twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

But why does your company need a blog? The advantages of this fancy new way of doing business aren't so obvious, and you could be forgiven for passing blogs off as the latest new Internet meme that will eventually disappear into oblivion.

Although the blog and the "blogosphere" are reasonably new terms, the actual concept has been around for years under the guise of the "e/n site" and the personal home page. Providers of accessible off-the-shelf solutions are the reason for the fairly recent exponential growth of the formalized "blog", providing an accessible way of performing the principle tasks of a blog, namely writing and editing posts and comments.

A little over 12 months ago, the popular blog search engine Technorati put the "blogosphere" at over 70 million blogs, with an average of 120,000 created every day (That's 1.4 every second!) Needless to say, blogs aren't going anywhere, and if you're not going to represent your company and the products and services it's offering, then someone else will.

If that isn't reason enough, here's a few more points to argue the case. Starting a company blog enables you to:

Create a dialog with your customers

Blogs are an incredibly easy and efficient way of getting customer feedback. It's free market research, you can stay up to date with your target audience and everything they need and want.

This dialogue also gives you an opportunity to give your company a "personality" and interact on a more personal level than the regular "cold" corporate presence allows you to do.

Most importantly, this dialogue allows you to educate your existing and potential customers, subtly teaching them about your products or services in an interesting and unobtrusive way.

Position yourself as an expert

A blog allows you to position yourself as an expert, and give something away before a potential customer has even picked up the phone.

These giveaways needn't be expensive, and usually come in the form of free advice in your area of expertise. As long as it's genuinely useful and applicable them you'll have a captive audience to which you can subtly emphasize your strong points and easily distinguish yourself from your competitors.

This is an incredible competitive advantage! You've offered something to a potential customer, positioned yourself as an expert and been able to explain why you're better than anyone at what you do, before your potential customer has even seen the other alternatives.

Create transparency and build trust

Even if it's just letting everyone know that you're still alive and kicking, a blog allows you to keep your customers in the loop. Are things quiet around your camp because your in the midst of launching something new? Use your blog to not only let people know, but to build anticipation and excitement around your latest developments.

More serious than the "we're still here, and everything's great!" or "check this out!" messages, is crises management. You're company has received some bad press, and you need a way to put forward your position on the matter before things balloon and get out of hand.

Your blog allows you to do this quickly and effectively, not only enabling you to get your point across, but also to directly address your customers concerns via feedback comments.

Your customers will rest easy knowing you're listening and addressing the issue, you can monitor and even control the situation till things cool down and instead of loosing customers over a bit of bad press, you'll impress everyone with the way you quickly and efficiently handled a negative situation and minimized or completely avoided the potential fallout.

Boost your Internet presence

Search engines love blogs! They're full of juicy key words and because your blog will inevitably include details of your products, services and industry, you'll be be the "lucky" recipient of more high quality, targeted and completely organic (free!) search engine traffic than you'll ever get with the standard corporate web presence.

Naturally, as you're talking primarily about your company and it's products and services, you'll link through to product and information pages so those that are especially interested can get more information.

This is useful in three different ways. The first and most obvious is that you're primary web presence benefits from the traffic your blog is receiving. The second is that with a little foresight you can control the order in which people receive information on your products and services, getting slowly more involved and in-depth, in an effort to inform and persuade without confusing.

The third reason that these links are useful is a concept called deep linking. This topic is best saved for a dedicated post later on, but basically deep linking helps increase your search engine visibility by increasing the exposure of the deeper "levels" of your site.

Hopefully you've already made up your mind: Your company needs a blog. Now, my goal is to convince you that you need to get onto it right away! You should create a company blog right now because:

Blogs have a low entry barrier

Blogs cost next to nothing to set up or maintain. The AustralianBoating Blog is hosted for free on Blogger and you're accessing it via a sub domain which cost us nothing to set up.

Obviously your mileage may vary, but there's plenty of fantastic prepackaged software out there with great support communities, and they couldn't be easier to set up! You can have a completely free, professionally designed, hosted blog in a few minutes using either WordPress or Blogger

Of course there's two sides to every story, and on the other side of the coin is a custom built system, or modification of an existing package to integrate into or interface with your existing site. This is useful if you need to bring modules or widgets from your primary web presence over to your blog. Advertising or event calendars for example.

Blogs are pull, not push

People are slowly but surely migrating from invasive push technology to the much more pleasant pull variants.

What does this mean? If someone chooses to receive updates from your blog they can subscribe to your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed or if your blog allows it, they can get emailed updates. If they decide against their decision later on and subscribed via RSS, they can simply unsubscribe.

If they chose the email option, they'll more than likely be interrupted at a later date by an intrusive email, and will then have to spend their valuable time fighting with an unsubscribe form. Even if they've successfully unsubscribed from one email list, there's no telling how many others they've ended up on or what else you might have in mind for their email address...

Don't get me wrong, email lists are still very important in any online marketing campaign, but the future is definitely in pull technology. Even now, if you're looking for how many people you've connected with, the number of people subscribed to your RSS feed is a much more accurate metric than the number of people who probably deleted your email before reading it.

Once again, RSS and other so called "pull" technologies are topics probably best left for another post, but if you're keen on learning more about them, remember to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don't miss out :)

If you don't, someone else will

I've already touched on this, but it's not just that unsatisfied customer of yours that you need to look out for. If your competition catches on before you do, you've just given your customers one more reason to go with them over of you.

To finish up, I'll talk about the reason that we created this blog, and why we will continue to publish useful and informative posts like this one.

Our flagship product AustralianBoating.com.au was created for your customers, and this blog was created for you, our customers.

We are AustralianBoating.com.au and we specialize in Internet marketing with a focus on the Australian Boating and Marine Industry. If you have any questions about our business, or how we can help you, please don't hesitate to contact us now.