How does this help my business? How does it help me to stand out?

1. Team Communication. Companies use blogs internally to communicate project status to stakeholders and managers. It beats clogging everybody’s email with mass broadcasts. It allows these missives to be archived, indexed and easily searched.

2. Enrich Your Clients. You can easily link to articles and resources relevant to your readers and their needs. You can more easily attract experts to provide value-added content to your audience.

3. Get to Know Your Customer. Nobody buys from someone they don’t know. Blogging allows you to demonstrate your expertise and point-of-view quickly and easily. In addition, blogs allow customers to receive your updates in format they choose.

4. Collaborate. You can create your own marketing buzz to drive attention and buyers to your products and services. Some companies use internal blogs to report on projects or to track work groups distributed around world.

5. Research and Development. Weblogs are perfect forum to test out new ideas and receive instant feedback. You can allow others to see how you develop your products and services, and at same time, they can tell you how best to serve them.

But what heck is a blog? For elegant simplicity and beauty that blogs create, they certainly have an ugly, ungainly name. Blawg sounds like some kind of gurgling sound your cat makes before coughing up a hairball.

A blog, short for weblog, is often described as an online diary. The most recent entries (called posts) - appear on homepage of blog with links to archives of older posts. Archives are organized by date and often categorized by topic. Often, each post will have a form for readers to add their own comments and to give their opinion or reaction to post’s content.

But that's just what a blog looks like - it doesn’t really tell you why a blog is different from a conventional website.