Twitter, Facebook and other social media are great business tools. They can help connect with your audience and establish your brand. But prospective customers might enjoy more than 160 characters and a status update.

A website is only as good as the amount of people that view it.

A weblog, or “blog”, is an easy way to get new visitors and drive traffic to your site, while updating those who frequent it with news and other information relevant to them. Blogs can also seamlessly integrate with websites.

So let’s break down some benefits of a blog to your business using Venveo as an example. We really do practice what we preach!

Blogs are easy to publish.

They can be as simple or as involved as you wish. Our blogs vary from entry to entry. No matter how long they are, it’s no more difficult than writing a note.

Blogs are an inexpensive way to share information

This also includes promotions, and news about your business and allow for user comments and other feedback. We use our blog for many purposes, but we’re given feedback on news about projects and other happenings on a regular basis.

Blogs can be the centerpiece of a new website or integrated into an exisiting site very easily.

Our blog is a section of our main site, but many sites use a blog as their homepage. The direction you go with this really depends on what you’re looking to achieve with your online presence. Ultimately, creating a strong call-to-action for viewers to read your blog can be very beneficial.

Blogs allow for integration with social media.

For example, your blog can automatically be posted to your Facebook wall or linked-to in a Tweet. We use an RSS aggregator to push our blog entries to our Facebook wall. The same can be done for Twitter quite easily.

Blogs allow room for creative freedom regarding your content.

They can be as casual or formal as you wish. We try to keep our blogs as professional as possible while still being fun and informative. It’s up to you how your blog is created.

Blogs can contain links to other resources, photos and video clips of your products or services.

Including a link to learn more about a product or a video from YouTube can engage users to investigate. Many times we see that by posting information about someone else  they will return the favor to us. This helps to establish credibility and community online.

Blogs can be posted and edited on a whim

Whether you’re ublishing from the office, home or even on the road blogs give you many options for keeping it current. We created a mobile administration application for our CMS so we can post and edit on the go.

Blogs and search engines go well together.

Many different keywords can be linked to your various blog entries, increasing traffic to your site. We get a good amount of traffic from search engine results based on our blog entries.

With all of this being said, there are some very compelling reasons to have a blog but there aren’t as many reasons to not have a blog for your business. Even the President’s dog Bo has a blog… shouldn’t you? Enough said.