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Below are the top 9 reasons why companies should blog.

1. They the perfect public relations tool. Their personal nature gives you and your organization a unique voice online - a voice heard by the people who matter - your customers and clients, other bloggers and the media.

2. Blogs act as instant-feedback mechanisms. They allow readers to respond to your posts via the comments section or link to them on their own blogs using Trackback. These features provide near real-time feedback on ideas, opinions and issues that affect them, or highlight and address new or existing problems.

3. Blogs help to position you and your company as experts and leaders in your industry.

4. Their simplicity and addictive nature allow you to share more of your knowledge more often. Blogs are about sharing what you know, think and believe on an ongoing basis.

5. Search engines index your blog posts more often because of more frequently updated content. Your ongoing blog and knowledge sharing shows up in the search results, making it easier for your customers and prospects to find you.

6. You can have many conversations with many people at once - something nearly impossible in the brick and mortar world.

7. They?re automatic buzz-machines. Go ahead and try it. Blog about something new - a new product or service launch, an improvement to an existing product, or a newly appointed manager. See how fast the news spreads throughout the blogosphere.

8. They?re self promotional due to their RSS feeds being aggregated across the net almost instantly, exposing your knowledge to a growing number of potential company evangilists.

9. Companies who blog are considered early adopters, thought leaders and ?in. Blogging is cool and companies who blog are cool.

But the most important thing to remember when blogging is that you?re not a speaker talking to an audience, you are sharing and interacting. You are one more voice to be heard and how powerful that voice is depends on how much interacting you do. It?s the opposite of Advertising.

Paul Short is a veteran internet marketer, professional blogging consultant and owns the popular blog directory http://www.getblogs.com

For more information on blogging and marketing with blogs, check out Paul’s site at http://www.bloglogic.net

Try and jog your memory a little to discover and appreciate this major Internet secret for blog success. Think back to the last great movie you saw or book you read. How did you end up seeing the movie or purchasing the book? Did you respond best to the ads or did you make your move because of the recommendations you got from others who had seen the movie or read the book?

Or alternatively, what would you trust, an advertisement or a recommendation, even if it is from a stranger?

The answer is rather obvious and it tells you why sites like Amazon.com have been such a huge success. Folks mostly buy books at the recommendation of others that seemingly have the same taste and inclinations as they do.

Our little experiment also tells you why PR is always so much more effective than advertising. A small favorable mention in a newspaper article or on the TV news show is often much more valuable and effective than dozens of expensive advertisements placed in the media.

It also tells you why affiliate programs have rapidly grown online into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today. It?s much easier for me to refer you to another site or product than it is for me to try and sell you my own products and services.

Imagine the sort of power and effectiveness that you can harness from having other blogs out there commenting on your product or service? Actually quite a number of leading online businesses are already cashing in big on this little secret that should actually not be a secret at all. Have you heard of folks talking about leading entrepreneurs seeking out bloggers to blog about them and their businesses? It is quite common these days and some of the names being associated with this practice are big online names like Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.

So what do the big boys know that the rest of us are slow to grasp? One obvious answer is the power of blogs and especially the power of recommendations and referrals from other people?s blogs.

You can go one step further and have a valuable article giving out useful tips on a hot subject that relates to the site that you want to refer people to. The advantage with this sort of article is that it is bound to get a much wider readership which means that at the end of the day, it will end up registering many more referrals to the targeted site. There are however a few secrets to making referrals effective which you should acknowledge.

Christopher Kyalo is a successful online writer and entrepreneur. Read the rest of this article at his Blog profits blog.