In the past two posts I have written about getting people to pay attention I have written about social networking where sort blasts of information are the way you get people’s attention. We will go back to that next week with Twitter but for this week I am writing about Blogs where we share several paragraphs of content and sometimes more with our readers. Blog stand for Web Log and it is good to think of it as a place to log activity and share thoughts.

In the article we are going to address using blogs for small business. There are blogs for politics, cooking, medicine, news, sports, and almost anything else you can imagine. If someone does it they have probably blogged about it. To get an idea of what is out there Technorati and Ice Rocket are great places to search. Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us can help you see what content is popular.

Rather than try and dance around the issue of what should be in a blog for your small business and what should not I will give you the tool I use. Will my readers care? If I cannot answer in the affirmative than there is no reason for me to post. Just because you can post about what you ate for dinner does not make it relevant to my readers, now if you are a personal chef and you just made the best Salmon and mustard sauce that you want your readers to know you can make for them then this is a perfectly relevant post.

There are many tools to help you blog and some of them pug directly in your website like Ballet Nouveau Colorado, in Broomfield or you can have your blog be on a separate site like the Denver DataMan blog you are reading. There are lots of blog sites that bring together many well known or talented bloggers like Examiner.com that has many topics Eric Elkins an accomplished blogger and owner of WideFoc.us a social media strategies company. Eric writes as the Internet Business Examiner. When considering the placement of your blog consider who will read it, why they will read it, when they will read it, if only one person will write on it or if many users will share in the writing.

If you are going to start a blog make sure you have the time to commit to keeping it up to date. I am not perfect about this are there are times I go two weeks without posting and then post three times in a week, but the better you can be about regular posting the more you will get people coming to look for your posts or RSSing your posts for future reading.

If you are not ready to blog a good way to get started is to read others blogs and make comments. Blogs are designed to be replied to. Good blog authors do not sensor appropriate material even if it argues with their point. Our goal is to Join a Conversation and encourage others to interact, share our blog with others and keep your message flowing. With social networking and social bookmarking your blog can become a hit very quickly. Tools like Nielsen’s Blog Pulse help you track where your blog is linked to or forwarded.

The two most important things you can take away from this is that when you blog you need to do so consistently and always ask yourself will my users care.

Next we I will write about Micro Blogging using twitter and how all of these social media technologies can come together to help you make your small business thrive. Also consider attending the Denver DataMan March Social Networking Seminar series.