Business blogs are one of the marketing flavors du jour that are being bandied about these days. Without question, there are good reasons to blog but you do need to assess what you are willing to invest and what you expect to get out of this exercise.

So if you’ve been considering jumping in as a business blogger, it’s worth taking time to answer a few questions:

1) What is the potential ROI on this project? Do you need to add depth of content to your site for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes? If you’re doing e-commerce and are fighting with your online competition over a given keyword, then yes, you’d probably benefit for the increased exposure. Google and other search engines will index sites higher that are updated often, that link to other sites and that have lots of inbound links.

2) Do you need or want to be perceived as a trusted advisor who provides good advice or hot news? Do you have unique insights or research that can truly benefit your circle of contacts? If you say yes to this, a blog is an easy tool with which to publish your pearls of wisdom.

3) Are you motivated to take this on? Can you (or someone else in your enterprise) commit to spending the time to provide fresh, useful information?

4) Does this establish you as a thought leader? Can you see a real benefit that your business or that of your clients will experience if you throw your deepest insights onto the web? Could this help you recruit new employees or develop stronger relationships with your clients?

5) Are you willing and able to receive and act on feedback from your blog, even if it’s less than glowing?

and last but not least

6) Can you resist urge to create self-aggrandizing, shameless puffery? (Because let’s face it, even our moms don’t have the patience to put up with that.)

IF you can answer YES to all of these questions, then terrific, fire up the Wordpress and go for it. And if anyone comes up with a better word than “blog” please let us know.

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