For small businesses with limited marketing budgets, the internet is a great way of telling potential customers about your company. But blogging – where users post their own articles online – is become more popular.

Blogging can help small businesses gauge whether there is a demand for their product, create a market by pulling together like-minded individuals before starting up or launching a new product and boost the number of hits your website receives from search engines. They can even become money-spinners in their own right, attracting advertising revenue, sponsorship deals and affiliate schemes if the readership figures are right.

Hayden Allen-Vercoe and Peter Brady, co-founders of the Orbital Media Network, offer the following top 10 tips on how a small business owner can make the most of blogging:

1. There are some excellent free ways to start blogging using services but these can become slow to operate and never allow ownership of your domain. If you have some technical expertise, you might want to try designing your own blog using wordpress (a free blog software), typepad or drupal or you could approach a specialist blog consultant who can produce a readily optimised blog, with professional design and ongoing consultancy

2. Ownership of your domain is essential. This gives you the flexibility to change server hosting, blog platforms and the option to possibly sell the domain/blog at a later date

3. Work out what you want to achieve from your blog. Do you want to use it as a public relations tool? Do you want to attract traffic to your site through search phrases? Do you want to market products or services through your blog? These are just a few of the questions you really need to answer before you start

4. Starting a blog and writing 30 articles in one week and none for the next three months is not a good strategy. Work out how often you can add content and stick to it, whether it’s once a day or once a week

5. In order to maintain contact with readership, you should make sure your blog includes a RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) and e-newsletter functionality

6. Understand which keywords are important to your online visibility (in every article posted) by using a research tool like www.wordtracker.com [1]. This can help target content to keywords that are being searched for

7. It’s important to maintain honesty and a degree of openness when operating a blog. If you lie or are a paid up member of the ‘hard sell school’ then blogging becomes ‘blagging’ and rapidly loses you respect

8. Deciding who should blog and how is something you should consider. The likes of Sun Microsystems and Microsoft allow employees to blog without any rules whatsoever, while others allow it to take place within certain guidelines or restrict it to the chief executive or directors. The key is for you to research any concerns you have and get comfortable with the concept. Ultimately, you should discover that the widely accepted benefits of blogging far outweigh any potential issues

9. Copyright of your content and others is important. As a starting point it is well worth visiting www.creativecommons.org [2] which provides helpful advice and tools on this matter. However, there are some simple, non-exhaustive principles that can be helpful:

• Check whether content or pictures can be referenced and if so mark them with full credits back to your source. Be sure that you understand the particular terms of use and abide by them
• Common sense: don’t lift vast extracts and utilise them for commercial use without permission first
• Don’t panic about copyright. Apply the principles you would normally follow when producing conventional marketing material and you’re on the right track

10. Blogs are not a quick fix. However, they are ‘cheap as chips’ to operate and can provide untold promotional benefits as part of an integrated, long-term marketing strategy

For more information see www.orbitalmedianetwork.com [3]