Blogs are a great way to build audiences, release products, and inform followers of news releases. The great thing about blogs is their informality. You do not have to have a formal press release to inform people of a new development or direction, and you have total control over what is written.

Services such as blogger, vox, live journal and wordpress are some of the leaders in the blog area (This particular blog was built on blogger). These allow you to post content, field comments and so much more with much less coding than if you did it on your own. These are simple content management systems that allow posting of content in a snap and without coding knowledge. Once it is set-up, it is good to go.

Here's some examples:

The Google Blog -- Google uses this blog to alert people of upcomming changes, interesting things that you can use google for and things that they support. See it in action.

culture. ish. -- This site is used to publish all culture. ish. publications online. It was also, at one time, used to host the culture. ish. podcast. The domain www.culture-ish.com is also linked to this blog for direct access. See it in action.

Integra Marketing Sample -- This hypothetical blog could be used to tell clients of upcomming changes as well as potential clients of the benefits of joining Integra Marketing. This is just a simple sample, but it is fully functional. See it in action.

The final key to blogs is the RSS feed. This allows individuals to subscribe to certain blogs and be automatically informed whenever a blog is updated. It also allows you do post your blog posts on social networking sites such as facebook and virb. The easier it is for people to be updated about releases, the more likely they are to follow it.