According to the Technorati blog search engine, there are now more than 50 million blogs on the web, and the number is doubling every six months. That’s 75,000 new blogs each day. Blogging has certainly captured the minds of millions across the globe. According to recent research, small businesses are aware of its potential, but are failing to take practical action to blog strategically.

With blogging showing no sign of being a short-lived fad, small businesses should approach it with care. Rushing into a blog could do your business more harm than good, so before you begin it’s crucial to make sure you understand why you’re doing it.

Conversational commerce
Increasingly, customers want to patronise businesses they can form a relationship with, rather than just simply buying from them and walking away. The closer the relationship, the more loyal a customer will become.

The point is reinforced by Rainer PR’s Stephen Waddington: "One of the main advantages of using blogs is that there is an open channel of communication. Businesses succeed by creating a product or service that customers require and feedback is critical.

"As blogs are seen as an informal medium, feedback is generally more honest and open than if it was through a customer survey. It can also help to personify a company – so that customers can more readily relate to its business."

Small businesses have traditionally been seen as more accessible than bigger ones; often, customers favour them even if the goods or services are more expensive. According to Microsoft’s Steve Clayton, blogs can put a human face to a business.

He says: “Blogging allows a business to have a conversation with a customer – a dialogue, not a sales pitch. We know people tend to buy from people they like and trust, and a blog can help to build and nurture that kind of relationship with new and existing customers.”

Stephen Holford of hosting company Fasthosts agrees. He says: “Customers are able to get insights into a company and its services through a blog, and to comment on this and their own experiences, so there is a lot of added value to the customer experience. If customers are happy, they are likely to recommend the blog and, by default, the company to their friends and colleagues.”

Blogging toolkit
So how do you start a blog for your business? If you do a Google search for blogging applications, you’ll be faced with a massive choice of platforms. There are plenty of tools that anyone can use to start a blog in minutes, as very little technical knowledge is needed to set up the vast majority of them.

However, if you like the look of systems such as Moveable Type or Wordpress, you’ll need to know a thing or two about how your server is set up to get the best from these, as they require some server side manipulation, but the extra effort is worth it.

Many consumer-orientated blog applications are free and include a complete hosting package. However, these services are often limited in the options they provide to modify your blog’s layout and don’t have useful systems that can track comments. There may also be bandwidth limits. For a fee you can buy premium services that give you much more versatility and control over your blog. They are a good investment if you want to take your blogging seriously.

Blog systems for business effectively break down into two types. First are those you host on your own server, which require that you design the pages yourself, and then there are those that are hosted by other companies and can use template systems for the design.

Of the first, the two best known are Wordpress and Movable Type, while Typepad is one of the best hosted platforms for small business. It allows you to have your own URL and offers the ability to install your own corporate design as well. If you are a large corporation looking to use blogging internally there are a number of companies (including Blogtronix and iUpload) that offer multiple blog systems for large groups of employees.

You need to take the same factors into account with blogs as you would with standard web hosting, including connectivity and power backups. It’s also vital to ensure that you can use your company’s domain name – many of the free blog hosting services don’t allow that, while others may have compulsory adverts or other undesirable restrictions. Some companies, such as Fasthosts, now include free blogs with their business hosting services.

As with any business project, it’s wise to take some time to evaluate each of the blogging platforms available to you, rather than rushing in. As Mark White, e-marketing consultant and blogging specialist at Better Business Blogging points out, it’s important to make the right choice.

He says: “Small and medium-sized businesses should choose something that gives them control and flexibility. It should also be able to grow and develop with them – as companies start to use a blog and discover just how useful they are, they start to see the additional uses over and above its original purpose.

"Blogger, for example, is fine for personal use but it falls short as a business tool. The two platforms I would recommend are Wordpress and Typepad, with my own preference being Wordpress because of its power and flexibility.”

And, of course, in a larger organisation, the choice of blogging software – especially if it’s to run on your own servers – may be dictated by the IT systems you already have.