Does Blogging Work as a Business Tool?

How do blogging and email marketing work together, and do they? My opinion: email as a tool is great for conversion and retention, but what about acquiring new ones?

I've heard that email and search still make up the majority of online activity. How do leverage 'search' to reach new people?

To use search as a way to get more new contacts, there is Pay-Per-Click and SEO. To me they are one and the same, except you have to pay for one.

If your website ranks among the top dozen results after a search, you're doing well and can probably stop reading here.

Most if not all clicks are made on a search engine results page such as Google.

So here's the problem: PPC only gets a small amount of clicks on search engine pages, and traditional website SEO tactics don't come close to fulfilling the volume of keywords that an organization needs to target.

The supplement? Notice I said supplement and not "the answer". Search engines, when it comes down to it, want to deliver relevant content. This is where blogging comes in.

When blogging, pay attention to the following: keywords (the more content, the more chances you have to use the keywords you want to be found on), page titles (a page with a title that matches the search phrase has a much better chance of improving their rankings), and frequency (blogs are updated more frequently--search engines put a higher value on pages that are updated more).