Small businesses with a presence on the Internet are discovering there can be a sales advantage to adding blogs to their web sites. With an estimated 4 million blogs in existence, these regularly updated online journals are one of the Internet's fastest-growing features. They’re full of news, opinions and ideas, are generally written by people who are passionate about their topics and often have links to related content on the web.

Celebrities and techies have been blogging for years now. The first web logs (shortened to blogs) appeared in 1999. But the phenomenon is catching on with businesses because of its effectiveness in establishing a company’s reputation or brand.

If customers find your blog interesting and engaging, they will spend more time – and more money – on your site, and they’ll continue to come back and buy again. Many companies hire writers who hold the customers’ interest, and of course, pitch the company’s product.

An article in DM News discusses how companies are finding sales success through blogs. One example, eHobbies.com, has seen its sales conversion rate double from two percent to four percent when site users visit one of its blogs.

Since adding blogging to its site in May, five percent of its overall traffic has come from its main blog destination, www.ehobbies.blogs.com, and five percent of all orders can be tracked to a blog-based coupon.

Another advantage of blogs is that they rank high in search engines, which can help to get your company noticed. For example, eHobbies.com went from 18th to 3rd position in a Google search for a particular brand of digital radio control system due to the mention of the product in one of the company’s blogs.

Of course blogs are not for every business. The key is fitting blogs into the company’s overall strategy, then creating a blog that customers want to return to and read regularly.

Companies might as well be using blogs to increase sales, because their employees are spending a whole lot of time reading them. According to AdAge.com, in 2005, U.S. workers wasted the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs!

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