Before you enter the wonderful world of blogging, you will want to consider what the purpose of a business blog is, and how fulfilling that purpose will help your business.

Almost all of us know why we’re supposed to start blogging… to get more visitors, more targeted traffic, and better search engine results.

But once I help someone get their system set up, the next question is, "Now what? What am I supposed to be doing with this blog thing?"

To help define the purpose of your blog, it helps to know what a blog is supposed to do.

A blog is primarily a communication tool. It can help you interface with:

• your clients
• your prospects
• other experts in your industry, and
• other experts in parallel industries

It brings your audience together in one place where they can stay updated on your site’s topic and theme.

There are direct effects to this communication, as well as indirect effects -known in the pharmaceutical sphere as ‘"side effects".

Successful business blogging will often have a direct effect on your ability to disseminate information to your audience, and on streamlining your process of networking with other business people who blog in related areas.

(It’s amazing how quickly you can get in touch with people who are traditionally hard to reach, such as a CEO of a company, by sending a trackback or commenting - which we’ll get into in upcoming days.)

But even more interesting are the "side effects" of blogging, that is, the other results you can get when you blog successfully.

We’re used to hearing the term side effect and thinking negatively, such as in the case of taking a medication for allergies with the side effect of becoming lethargic.

However, the side effects to blogging are positive.

One of them would be increased search engine visibility. As I state in another article, blogging with a superior blog system is no longer poor man’s SEO, it’s every man’s SEO (search engine optimization).

Another positive side effect would be an increase in sales.

We’ll go over how to leverage some of these positive side effects - and how they occur -  in the next post.