If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

The market for blogs has exploded. Many companies do not want to invest the time in developing a blog in their respective niche, which has given rise to a whole new cottage industry, blog flipping.

Blog flipping is done in a few different ways. Some flippers buy an existing blog that has potential, but is not currently producing. They take that blog and build the traffic and sales up to a level productive enough to reap a profit from their investment, and then sell it.

Or, more common in today’s blog flipping market, is to research a specific niche, develop a domain / blog, and then sell it.

The New York Times is running an article looking at “hyperlocal” web sites as replacements to traditional newspapers. The catalyst for the concept is obviously the fact that some newspapers have been dying off, at least in print form.

The piece looks at web startups EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placebologger, and Patch, which “collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources.” It is an interesting look into some possibilities for local news options beyond the local paper.

It’s no secret that a continually updated website with new content being added regularly stands a good chance of doing well in Google. One of the long standing methods to regularly expand a site’s content is through the use of a blog.

While there are numerous platforms to choose from for managing a blog, few can compare with the immense flexibility offered with WordPress, and at a cost of free, the price can’t be beat either.

“So, what do I blog about each time?” is a question I often get from clients. To keep your blog active and healthy, I recommend blogging at least 3 times per week. However, that notion is overwhelming for many. Even though you may be an expert in a topic, your mind may go completely blank when it comes time to blog, and then at other times when you’re not blogging, your idea cup runneth over.

An old colleague of mine used to joke he was one of millions whose job it was to “feed the internet.” This past November, an alumnus of a prestigious writing program in Louisville, Ky. told soon-to-be-alumni his blogging career was short-lived because, like a bad girlfriend, his blog constantly needed him.

Those heralded A-listers we all looked to over the past few years? Many of them are hanging it up. Mike Arrington: handed over the TechCrunch reins to hired staff. Jason Calacanis: moved to email. Their chief complaints: fame. Too many haters, too much spit in the face.

If you have a blog, or you are thinking of building one, there are a few things you should definitely do to make sure it is a success. We dive down deeper into all these things in our eBook “How to Build a Successful Blog“, and you can download it for FREE at www.profitchoice.com/blogs/ebook.php.

WebPronews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson was present for the keynote delivered by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV at the BlogWorld Expo. Vaynerchuk talked about how “America is a branded society.”

(WebProNews spent the weekend in Vegas at the BlogWorld Expo and chatted up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to WebProNews and WebProNews Video for updates.)

Vaynerchuk is a self-trained wine expert who runs the popular video blog Wine Library TV. He has appeared on Conan O’Brien and Ellen Degeneres’ shows and has grown his family’s $4 million business into a $45 million one.

If you already have your own blog, or are thinking of setting one up, you’ve undoubtedly read one or more of the beginner’s guides to blogging that frequent the Internet. Blog often and provide unique, fresh, entertaining, accurate, and relevant information. That’s the content of virtually all of those articles, but this information is only going to get you so far.

The information they provide will help you drive traffic to your blog, as long as you stick at it, and some of the more in depth articles may even give you a basic shove in the right gold paved direction. However, there will come a time when you’re ready to take your blog to the next level.

If you haven’t read Get Your Blog Google-Ranked in 30 Days Or Less, Part 1, you aren’t going to want to miss it. But, here are even more useful suggestions to put your blog on steroids without any blog-roid rage. Please read on.

25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site’s content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.