While I was wildly deleting spam emails this morning, Chris Abraham’s blog post title caught my eye, just in the nick of time. I found it to be a great article, and wanted to share it with you all. It has to do with the importance of blogging.

For many small business owners, blogging is a little more than scary. If they even had a marketing department to help them, it’d probably take a ransom note and the threat of their website disappearing into the “Internet ether” for them to really get involved. Well, I’m here to deliver that note, because if you’ aren’t blogging, disappearing is probably what a website faces as a result. Well, disappearing of the first few pages of Google searches, anyway.

Chris brings up some great points in his article, titled, “8 Reasons Why Now is the Best Time to Start Blogging,” and anyone interested in blogging (or social media in general) would find it worthwhile. One of the points that really resonated with me is how much dedication and work is involved! Blogging and leveraging corporate social media really takes discipline and hard work. But that’s just part of being in business, and always has been.

The good news Chris brings is that those who take a business-like approach and are disciplined about blogging will probably beat out their competition. There are so many tools available now that make it easier to handle the logistics of blogging and leveraging social media. The Association is using Topic Optimized Marketing, but there’s no lack of tools.

Now’s the time to start blogging! If your company hasn’t started taking advantage of long tail keyword research coupled with today’s’ blogging technology, it might be time to write your own ransom note. I suspect a lot of company websites will be held “hostage” by those companies who start (or have already started to) engaging in blogging. Where will your company show up?