Most SMB’s are vaguely familiar with blogs–at best. However, in certain industries–software, marketing, technology–business blogs are redefining customer relationships and how business is done. At minimum, small and midsize businesses should understand blogging. If a company starts blogging sooner rather than later, it stands to reap enormous benefits.

At this writing, Technorati tracks close to 50 million blogs and 2.7 BILLION links. That’s a lot of communication. Personal blogs make up a good portion of those numbers, but business blogs are cropping up everywhere. Why?

1. Blogs are inexpensive to start and update. A basic Web site with little or no dynamic functionality costs upward of $1000–usually quite a bit upward. Setting up a blog costs as little as nothing. Updating Web site content is complicated and slow. Blogs can be updated on the fly, even from a cell phone.

2. Blogs facilitate genuine communication with customers. This is huge. As consumers, we’re all skeptical of ad hype and ad speak. A blog is a forum where employees can post frank information and get frank customer response. All in plain English. How is our service? How are our products? How do we stack up against the competition? What else do you need from us? If a company wants answers to these questions–blog.

3. Blogs improve search engine visibility. SE’s love fresh content. If a company blog is within its Web site domain, it will boost rankings. Blogs can generate lots of backlinks, another site attribute highly favored by SE’s.

4. Blogs generate new business. Blogging is all about relationships. If blog content is relevant, helpful, thought-provoking, and/or entertaining, it will build an audience. People will link to the blog, driving more people there. This growing audience represents potential new customers, probably ones the company would not have identified through its traditional sales and marketing programs.

There’s much more, but to me these seem very compelling. For more, Yaro Starak offers enthusiastic blogging insights. His blog contains lots of “how-to” information on business blogs.