Top Ten Reasons… plus 1 for why (almost) every business needs a blog:

Easy to Publish
1. Blogs make it incredibly easy to publish to the web – you simply type, press submit, and you’re done.

Inexpensive
2. Blogs are a very inexpensive way to publish to the web – once a blog has been established, anyone, even the most technologically challenged, can create blog entries. No more paying an outside contractor an hourly rate or taking your IT guy off of his assigned tasks to do a page for you.

Fast
3. Blogging is a fast way to publish – you simply type and submit. It doesn’t take an hour to structure the page, debug the code and work it into your link system.  It just happens.

Immediate
4. Blogging is immediate – no more waiting a week for the programmer to get around to your site changes. You can literally react on a moment-by-moment basis with a blog, putting your point of view on a crisis or other issue for the public and press to view immediately.

Get noticed by the search engines
5. Blogs are a great way to get your site noticed by the search engines – search engines love blog entries.  Many people who have blogs have discovered that their blog entries are getting faster inclusion in the search engine, and more importantly, higher rankings on the search engines.  Try it for yourself, you may be surprised!

As further evidence of this, Google now owns Blogger, one of the most widely used blogging tools available. Why not work with a technology that is seen by the leading search engine as important enough to actually own?

Blog content can be wide-ranging
6. Blogs can be used for a wide variety of content – you don’t have to just write about one thing in a blog, the possibilities are endless.

You can have multiple blogs
7. You can have multiple blogs – once you’ve made the initial investment to set up and structure a blog, it’s usually very simple to add a new blog for other purposes.

Blogs can be used internally
8. Blogs are great for communicating within your organization – blogs don’t have to be public. They can be on intranets, behind firewalls, and/or password protected. This, plus their ease of use, makes them a great source for internal communications, project tracking, issue resolution, etc.

Blogs position your company as an expert
9. Blogs are a great way to position your company in the eyes of your customers, your industry, and the press. Blogs can be used to support whatever positioning you wish to achieve: superiority, innovation, playful, giving, environmentally concious, etc.)

Blogs put your content on other sites
10. Blogs are a great way to get your company’s content onto the sites of other people (oftentimes, your competitors!)  We’re going to discuss this in much more detail later, but almost all blogs have a syndication feature built into them that makes it easy for you to put your content out for others to include on their websites.

This means that a portion of the work you produce (usually the headline and the first few words of the copy) can be picked up by and shown on other sites.

Then, when that site’s visitor clicks for more information, they show up at your site. Most good business bloggers are discovering that this feature is bringing in a substantial amount of additional traffic to their sites than they received before.

And the most important reason for a business to blog?

Blogs can convert visitors into sales
11. Blogs convert into sales and profits – those companies who actively use blogs as part of their marketing program have discovered that blogs bring in more visitors to your website and that a high percentage of those who visit a blog, if properly influenced through that blog’s content, will actually buy from their company.