Blogs are the hottest thing going these days when it comes to marketing on the Internet. A blog is a way of delivering your messages and article to clients. They are a like personal web sites, easy to create and far less expensive than traditional web sites.

Just when you thought you were mastering the tasks of ezines and newsletters, along comes blogging, and you have to ask yourself:

Do I really need a blog?
Isn’t an email ezine or newsletter doing the same thing?
Should I do both?
Are these two marketing tools going to eat up all my time, energy and money?
What’s the best way to spend my resources here so that I can get clients and results out of my marketing efforts?

Here are ten reasons why you should pay attention to this new blogging revolution and do both and ezine and a blog.

1. Because a blog is web based, it is published instantaneously every time you post. This allows you to be spontaneous and current with issues that affect your readers/clients. Blog posts are short, ezines can be longer. One can complement the other.

2. Because blog posts are spontaneous, they tend to be more informal, friendly, and conversational. Blog posts show your personality. Ezines show your knowledge. Your readers/clients need to know who you are before they will invest in your services. Providing both an ezine and a blog allows your readers to get to know you.

3. You can set up a subscription form on your blog and your subscribers will get a short notice in their inboxes each time you post something new. This is a great way around the spam filter problem which blocks so many ezines and legitimate messages from professionals.

4. Blogs link to other blogs and web sites, which helps you create a viral marketing system, increasing your exposure to search engines. Search engines love blogs because they are text based and key word rich. Your rankings go up when you publish a blog and use linking and posting on a frequent basis. You can also link to your own web site(s).

5. You have instant access to all your published articles on your blog. A blog automatically creates archives of previous posts. You see them in a side-bar for easy access. You put them into categories for easy finding. One clever person we know spent a day posting all her ezine articles to her blog, so that it would appear she has been blogging for a much longer time. Also, readers of her blog may not have had the opportunity to read all of her other ezine articles.

6. You can use your blog to become a trusted expert in your field by filtering content on the web for your subscribers. Readers don’t have time to surf and to collect information, but you can do it for them, thereby establishing yourself as a good resource.

7. You can set up links for ads, products, and for your affiliate programs in the blog side columns so you don’t have to include them in the body of your

Denise Wakeman is Chief Implementor of Next Level Partnership, a company dedicated to partnering with you to take your business to the next level. Denise has nearly 20 years experience in small business administration and management. She has specific experience in leveraging Internet marketing systems to create awareness, build customer loyalty and increase the bottom line. Visit Denise's blog at http://www.biztipsblog.com to get tips and tactics for taking your business to the next level.

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