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The exponential rise of blogging as part of the web 2.0 phenomenon has taken the Internet by storm. Smart online and offline marketers and business owners are now using blogs as an additional tool to generate leads, add credibility and improve their search engine rankings. Here are eight reasons why you should set up your own blog:

Blogging gives you products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By blogging you show your target market that there is a real person behind the company or product you represent. By reading you blog posts they get an idea of what you’re all about - warts and all. The personal aspect of blogging is one of it’s most powerful characteristics.

Blogging is entertaining. Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity. Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts. You posts plus reader comments all become valuable food for the search engines.

Blogging encourages community. Bloggers love to talk online to other bloggers. If you join blogging communities and make a worthwhile contribution you will see your traffic skyrocket. It’s all about content - fast, useful and entertaining content that people enjoy reading.

Driving traffic to blogs is easy You’ve probably heard about social bookmarking sites like digg.com and reddit.com ? A large proportion of submissions to these sites are blog entries. Want to promote you product? Write an honest review of your product on your blog then submit that blog entry to a social bookmarking site and see what happens.

Blogging is inexpensive. The most powerful blogging systems are free. Wordpress is one of the blogging standards and now comes bundled with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.

I wouldn’t use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate. You can’t be sure if they will always remain free and your posts will be building up someone else’ asset rather than your own.

It’s fast and easy. If you can use Microsoft Notepad you can blog. The user interface is very intuitive and allows you to add and edit, text, pictures, videos, whatever you want. Want to change the look and layout of your blog? There’s literally hundreds of themes available that take less than a minute to upload and install.

Your blog site becomes another Internet asset. Some blog sites get thousands and thousands of readers each day. This traffic can be converted to hard, cold cash through Google Adsense advertising, affiliate programs and straight advertising space sale. Some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, from providing excellent content through their blogs. Once you blog increases it’s Google PageRank, you also get the benefit of linking out from your blog site to other web sites you want to promote.

Search engines love blogs, I mean really love them. It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but I have found it to be true in my case. If you blog every day there’s a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog every day looking for that new content. I have seen blog postings get spidered and indexed and ranking well in as little as 30 minutes. It seems the blog RSS feeds go straight into the search engines’ data centres. Go to Google and do a search on Blue Nike Sneakers and you will see what I mean.

Convinced? Give blogging a try. There’s stacks of free resources listed in article directories like this one that will help you get into blogging.

John Hacking is Product Manager for a Brisbane SEO firm. He has just started an SEO blog .