On the topic of generally using a blog as a marketing channel, it really depends upon asking a couple of questions of your business. First who are your customers, and secondarily what are the interests, challenges, or topics that they might have in common. Once you come up with a theme that might resonate with your target market you can start a blog about that theme or topic. In the end the idea is to open a communication channel with potential customers that would not have existed previously.

Best case scenario you come up with a particular topic that intersects your expertise and interest, and with your core target markets interest.

A blog can also be used as a psuedo content management tool, if you have a news section on your web site you can use a blog to update it on a regular basis, you can even have non technical staff do it.

Here are some other benefits:

• Encourages repeat visits - a blog looks like it is updated and therefore promises changing content, if someone found something of interest to them, they will likely come back
• Encourages Inbound links or Backlinks - key to your position on search engines is incoming links, luckily blogs have got some wonderful technology that automates this process
• Captures Intellectual Capital - Even small businesses have intellectual capital, posting to a blog every couple of days eventually builds quite a lot of knowledge, and that is an asset to your business