The answer is "Yes". Creating and maintaining a blog is a good way to increase your online presence, make more people aware of your products and services, express opinions and share information, as well as being a good way to get feedback from customers and prospects.

Here are some of the reasons why you should have a blog, perhaps even before you have a regular static website.

1. You can do just about everything with a (Wordpress*) blog that you can do with a static website.

2. Setting up a blog is much easier than creating a website. Yes, it is true there is some basic programming involved. But if you get a professional "blog setter-upper" to do it for you it will cost much less than building a decent looking website.

3. Design is very flexible. There are hundreds of free "themes" that determine how it will look. And as long as you don't modify the theme too much you can switch themes on the fly in about 15 seconds for a completely new look.

4. Blogs are generally more search engine friendly because typical blog structure forces you to create content that is optimized the way the search engines like it.

5. The search engines (usually) crawl blogs more often than static websites, because blogs change more often. As new content is introduced with new product announcements or new information, those changes will get picked up more quickly by the search engines.

6. Blogs are perfect for publishing "news and views". This means you can add new content more often, and you can cover a wider range of topics than might be covered in a normal static website.

7. Blogs are interactive which makes them great for getting reader opinion, comment, and questions. If you want to interact with your customers and prospects a blog is a good way to do it.

8. Blogs can be integrated with social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo, Hub Pages, Twitter, and many others. This is usually done by simply loading in the RSS feed that the blog automatically creates.

I'm sure there are many other reasons why you should have a blog if you're involve in online business or communication. Leave a comment with your suggestions...

(*Yes, I know, this is not a Wordpress blog. It is powered by b2Evolution. That's because I've had it for a couple of years, it works, gets a bit of traffic, and it would be too much hassle to change it over. There's not much doubt that Wordpress is a more versatile and certainly more popular platform, and the one I recommend to clients.)

We are bundling an AutoBlog with membership in the Link Builder Network, which also inlcudes access to 75+ blogs where you can create posts promoting as many sites as you want.

Both of these factors should make it worth the effort to try to get your content on high PR sites. But the question is "How"?

One very useful approach is to leave comments or feedbak on interactive sites such as blogs or social networking sites. These links will usually be in the form of comments left in response to posts, stories, videos, etc.

Unless you are happy just leaving meaningless spam comments, leaving legitimate (or even semi-legitimate) comments on blogs takes time and effort. You have to actually go to the blog, read the posts, do a little bit of thinking, and then write a comment.

I don't know what the average time would be for doing this, but I'm pretty sure if you were to try to create an efficient "system" for commenting, it would be difficult to get the process down to less than 5 minutes per comment.

Yes, I know there is software that will find blogs, isolate posts according to keywords, and then let you create comments right from within the software shell. I've looked at this sort of thing and have not been convinced it would make the actual commenting time shorter.

The three most important criteria (from the "link value" perspective) for taking the time to create comments (either manually or semi-automatically) are:

1. The "authority" of the blog (measured in Page Rank)
2. The "relevance" of the blog to your own niche, and
3. The "do follow" or "no follow" status of comment links

I have already briefly commented on the "authority" question. I know that PR is not the be all and end all when it comes to ranking in the SERPs (results pages), but it does indicate potential link value, at least in my experience.

From the perspective of link value "relevance" is probably not as important as most people think. See my previous link relevancy post for more on this. But from the "I-actually-know-what-I'm-talking-about" point of view it makes quite a bit of difference. If you're taking the time to read the posts you're commenting on, you might as well read something you're interested in and are likely to learn something from. You will also be able to create comments more quickly because you'll have something intelligent to say.

On the "do follow" question, you have to know a bit of history to understand the significance of this. A couple years ago Google tried to clamp down on comment spam by encouraging bloggers to add the "no follow" tag to links embedded in comments. The "no follow" tag tells the Google bot not to follow these links - making them much less desirable from the link juice point of view.

Many bloggers obediently fell into line because they were intimidated by Google threats. But some resisted either silently or openly and left their comment links intact. These are usually referred to as "Do Follow" blogs.

If you can find a "Do Follow" blog that still has Page Rank, leaving comments on sites like that is generally considered worth the effort.

If you'd like to take a stab at building links this way, check out "How to Get a Free PR10 link". This will take you to a free report from Angela Edwards. Angela also has a subscription service where she sends you 30 new high PR blogs every month where you can get "do follow" links.