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John Jantsch over at Business Blog Consulting gets that question often and answers it on his blog - basically saying: “little to nothing”. His main reasoning is that most people will put up a blog, post a few times and then stop - wondering why it did not work.

Ok - I buy that. But when I get the question - and I get it often as well - I tend to answer it differently.

The main benefits from using a blog in business - if you do it right - are:

• A blog lets you disintermediate the conversations with your audiences. That is especially interesting for companies that have niche products or for smaller announcements. You are no longer limited to reaching people through mainstream media and you can actually start conversations with the “long tail“. The funny thing is that while doing all that you will also be able to improve your relationships with mainstream media folks - as they read blogs as a source of information.
• The second benefit - again, if you do it right - is that a corporate blog will let you increase the frequency of communications with your audiences. Bloggging will also give you increased “Google-juice” - which potentially could increase the size of your audiences. This is especially important for those companies where many buyers find their products through search.
• Another benefit of course is that a blog puts a human face on your company - look what Scoble did to Microsoft
• The biggest benefits may not even be in the areas of marketing communications and PR but in product innovation - getting the right customer requirements by engaging more of them in conversations - and customer service.

I did not make those things up. Many people much brighter than me have written about all those things long before me. But since I get that question often, I thought it would be worthwhile to post here. And again, none of those benefits will be achieved if you do not do it right!

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