When it comes to building credibility and gaining recognition as a knowledgable expert your marketing materials, web site, and even the occasional published article do little to establish you as a leader in your niche. Unless you have a full feature article published in a major national magazine or you have a regular weekly column in a major paper, it’s difficult to generate the respect and notoriety that press coverage can bestow.

But when you create a niche-focused business blog you can quickly gain recognition and respect while proving yourself with quality result-generating content. It’s amazing but true — you can post to your business blog for as little as two or three months and you’ll begin to establish substantial credibility in your market.

Using your business blog in this way has a number of benefits, but one of the most powerful is building a credible track record that speaks for itself. When a prospect arrives at your blog and sees how much knowledge you’re sharing and the passion you’re exhibiting about your chosen niche – people respond to that. And that response is usually to place you in a position of respect and expertise.

Get educated on the right way to start your own business blog, then follow a well-planned strategy. When you do, your RSS powered blog can become a major ally in your reaching for a position of recognition and respect in your industry or niche.

Business blogging is not a magic wand, but it is a powerful communication tool that can transform you into a serious “go-to” source of knowledge.

Blogs in general, and business blogs in particular got another credibility boost today. Ask Jeeves finally admitted that rumors of a purchase of the heavy hitting aggregator Bloglines were valid today. The search player “Ask Jeeves” continued it’s systematic acquisition of high leverage growth resources with the recent purchase.

What’s significant here is that all acquisitions made in the last year by Ask Jeeves (well over $500 million) have been made in properties that will significantly boost volume to it’s search engine and provide new mediums for advertising distribution. Bloglines is another purchase that fits right in with this plan.

“Ask Jeeves is, in the main, about information retrieval,” said Daniel Read, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves in a recent article. “What we see in Bloglines is another angle at looking at information retrieval. You could almost call it persistent searching. It enables you to persistently search for the type of information you’re interested in.”

Obviously blogs fit right into Ask Jeeves acquisition and high-leverage growth focus. With thousands of words of new niche specific content being added every minute in the form of blogs, the amount and quality of information is constantly growing. Ask Jeeves recognizes the direction that the internet is moving just as Google did when it purchased Blogger.com. The net is becoming increasingly personalized and niche-specific, and the companies that recognize that will be the leaders in the dynamic interactive environment of the new internet.

It’s not just about words and ideas — profit counts too!

The first integration project for Ask Jeeves will apparently be integrating the Bloglines team with Ask Jeeves’ Teoma search group to boost the search engine’s effectiveness. But if past comments by Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher (who’ll be joining Ask Jeeves as VP,) are any indication of the direction the blogosphere is moving then content-related integrated advertising is not far off either.

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, there is not yet a viable business model for profiting with RSS feeds. But targeted ads directly related to the content of blogs is inevitable. It will likely be the next evolutionary step in the maturation of the blogosphere into a more viable business growth channel.

Regardless of what your peers may or may not be saying about business blogging, the internet is being incrementally transformed day after day with blogs. If that were not true you would not see powerhouse players like Microsoft, Google, and Ask Jeeves pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the blogging arena. It’s the interactive connection that people have been longing for, and the “word of mouth” leverage that business owners have been longing for.

As a small business owners you have plenty of hard facts and market moves by “big dollar” players that indicate the way the 21st Century marketplace is moving. You need to either get off the beach and start surfing the wave of change now by starting your own business blog. Or you sit on the sand watching your competition have all the fun and gain more and more mind share. Don’t be fooled into a “wait and see” attitude. There is no in-between!

To learn how you can go from “blogging newbie” to business blogging master, check out the five week interactive coaching course How to Master Business Blogging.

Many times your prospects and clients are dying to know in detail how your product or service can help them. Very often in your websites sales copy it’s difficult to make the connection between benefits and the practical ways your product or service can be used. Your business blog can create the bridge you need to lead a curious prospect over the valley of trust to become a loyal client and raving fan.

Sharing real-life case studies in your business blog does two things.

1. It makes the benefits of your product or service tangible.
2. And it subtly creates social proof (Definition) that opens the door to deeper rapport.

You can devote your entire business blog to case studies, or just dedicate a section. But when you do, you’ll realize a significant increase in trust and rapport because people can interact with you by commenting on your case studies. Something that they could never easily do with a regular web site.

Software companies, programmers, and web designers can use a business blog to keep their clients up to date with the latest upgrades and fixes.

By creating a business blog with this purpose you can put your clients minds at ease knowing that solutions and upgrades are being worked on. And if your current work is not addressing an issue that one of your clients is aware of, you’re more likely to get feedback on other bugs or problems you should be looking into.

If your business or industry focuses on photos or visual imagery, then a business blog can be a big help too. Business blogs can be used for the rapid posting and wide distribution of visual content as well as text.

The only key with image-based blogs is that a text summary and alt image text is a must for each and every post. That helps humans make the linkage between the images and the benefit to them. And that helps the search engine spiders, because photos mean nothing to a Search Engine spider.

If you have a business where you’re not involved in the daily interaction with clients and prospects, or if your company is set up primarily as a virtual business, your prospects and clients may never get the opportunity to interact with you on a personal basis. They may never have the chance to really get to know you as the owner. And that distance may create some hesitancy or uncertainty in doing business with your company as a whole.

As strange as that may seem to some business owners, it’s a fact. People want a relationship with their product or service provider. The depth of that relationship will vary from person to person, and it will also depend on what is being consumed. But it’s a certainty that trust and connection will pave the way for better client-to-company relations.

This applies to all businesses, but it’s especially true with service-type businesses where there’s a higher level of human interaction built into every transaction. If your business provides a service, there’s a very personal interaction that takes place, whether you’re providing services to the general public, or to other businesses. If at all possible, consumers want to feel comfortable with you before hiring your company.

By using your business blog to express yourself and your opinions you can go a long way to putting a human face on small service companies, and even the largest of corporations. Take Robert Scoble for instance. He’s unintentionally (at least at first) done it for Microsoft with his blog “Scobleizer.” If it can be done for a behemoth like Microsoft, don’t you think you can do it for your small business?

The more relationship barriers you can remove for your prospects and clients, the easier the sales will be, And the more loyal clients will be. No matter what other focuses you might have with your business blog — always give your prospects and clients the opportunity to get to know the real you better. That human connection will give you and your prospects both what you’re looking for.

Does your business rely on the creation of new products, services, or information? If so, you can use your business blog and people’s natural curiosity to increase interest with “sneak peeks” of your works in progress.

As an added bonus, with a properly structured and well planned blog your readers can interact along the way with comments, trackbacks, or even private emails. With these forms of direct communication you’ll open a dialog that allows you to collect valuable input which may impact your development process and generate improvements before your new product or service even hits the market.

Plus … people who do open that dialog with you are prime candidates to have test the product or service before it goes out to the general public. They’ll appreciate being involved (so much so that they’ll often become your greatest evangelists.) And you’ll appreciate the final fine-tuning that they will contribute.

For small and mid-size businesses getting mentions in the press can be a big boost to your positioning in the marketplace. And your business blog can be a powerful tool in getting the word out on important announcements from your company.

In addition to using a service like PR Web that may get your release picked up by a daily paper or trade publication, you can post your Press Releases on your own business blog for a double whammy.

We’ve had coaching clients with active business blogs that have found their Press Releases being picked up in search engine queries ahead of powerhouse services like PR Web. Plus as an added benefit your Press Releases will remain as a permanent posts on your business blog thanks to permalinking. That means that both people and search engine spiders can always find that content at a set location so long as your blog is up and running.

If you have a lot of activity that goes on at your company, or if you deliver premium content to your clients as part of what you do – then it’s important to get that info out to your prospects and clients as quickly as possible. You can do that with a business blog.

You can publish literally “at-will” making real-time updates as new breakthroughs or shifts take place. If you’re updating readers on critical news or market data, their news aggregator automatically pulls in your news through your RSS feed.

No Spam filters, no email delivery problems, and no more interrupting your clients by “pushing” your content to them. Your clients and subscribers decide when they want to read your company news updates or premium content on their schedule.

This is just another example of how your business blog can make client-centric information delivery a practical reality!