There are many benefits to leveraging a blog for your business or even for your personal use. When many people hear the word “blog,” what immediately comes to mind are things like MySpace, teenagers sharing stories of heartbreak, love poems, emo photos, and so on… But chances are, if you access the web multiple times per week, you probably frequent a few sites that you didn’t even know were blogs!

Branding and Credibility

For newcomers, I like to describe blogs simply as a great tool for personal branding or client relations. You can try to define a blog as a “personal publishing platform,” but that description can still be very limiting. Blogs powered by open-source software like WordPress can be built for virtually any application—an online magazine, a technical journal, e-commerce site, an online CRM client, or even a full-blown social network—and blog designs and functionality can easily be manipulated to do almost anything the user could want it to do.

For me, since I began a professional blog less than three years ago, it has opened the door to many opportunities for me. I’ve made friends with readers and other bloggers from around the globe, I’ve met entrepreneurs from across California, I’ve been asked to write for various publications, I’ve had conversations with some of Silicon Valley’s big movers and shakers, and as a freelance web worker, I’ve landed clients in Texas, Canada, and even France because of my visibility through my blogs.

Skellie of Skelliewag.org is another web freelancer, and a very well-known blogger across the web. At her new site Anywired, she shares some tips for how to Earn More Income Online By Leveraging A Blog:

Whether you’re advertising freelance services, starting a website to sell a product or becoming a virtual assistant, you won’t find work if nobody is paying attention to you.

If you can start to think of an active blog as a source of attention you can leverage, it becomes apparent that even a moderately successful blog is an incredible resource for anyone working to earn an income online.

One other great tip she shares:

Your blog is a portable asset. It adds value to your business anywhere in the world (and allows you to avoid “I’m big in Japan” syndrome when you try to find work internationally.)

[via: Anywired]