A blog is an important communication tool for business. You can use your blog to distribute information to your potential customers, as well as build a relationship.

So how do you build a blog?

There are several ways that you can do it, but it all depends on how much time you want to spend on configuring your blog, as well as the types of customizations you want to do to your blog.

Below are several places where you can either get a blog, or get the scripts to build your blog.

Blogger - http://www.blogger.com - This is by far the easiest of all the blogs to build. It takes about 30 seconds to create a blog, and you don't need to know HTML. If you decide that you want to customize your blog, it does have an extensive knowledge base, and you can quickly learn how to add to the template to make it your own. It's also very search engine friendly.

Word Press - http://www.wordpress.org - Word Press is one of the most popular blog scripts on the internet. It has tons of features, and it's search engine friendly. Some of the most popular blogs on the internet use this system for blogging. Some examples of features include plugins that allow you to create an mp3 player on your site so that you can use for podcasting. Other features include: technorati tags, photos, sitemaps, and an extensive collection of templates so that you can use to change the look and feel of your blog.

The code is light and fast, and it is search engine friendly.

Nucleus CMS - http://www.nucleuscms.org - This is the system that I use for my main blog. It has a few features that Word Press doesn't have, like the ability to create an ezine from your posts and send them as email. You can use a cron job to automate the process, and you can send out your ezine when you want it to go out. This is especially helpful if you want to build a list of subscribers.

It's allowed me to combine two tasks: blogging and ezine creation.

There's an extensive collection of plugins you can use to customize your blog, as well as a theme system. The only drawback here is the lack of themes. However, new themes are being designed, and it's pretty easy to design your own, or customize one of the theme available.

Code is search engine friendly, and you can use plugins to create a Google Sitemap, add keywords, as well as technorati tags. You can also create multiple blogs from one installation.

Drupal - http://www.drupal.org - This is really a content management system, instead of a blogging system, and instead of just creating a blog, you can create a community of blogs, or a complete community, including forums, group meetings, and more. The code is very search engine friendly.

There is a rich text editor so that you can code your posts.

Regardless of what system you choose to create your blog, choose a system that you feel comfortable with. You can quickly and easily use blogs to build relationships with your customers, as well as distribute your content. By building and writing a blog, you can demonstrate your expertise on your topic, while building relationships with your customers and readers too.

Ultimately, blogging can become one of the best tools you can use to market yourself and your business, and it's free to implement.

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