You may already know that blogging can help your website get higher search engine rankings.  But blogging is not for everyone.  Here are some pros and cons.

Pros of blogging:

1. Blogs tend to be updated more frequently than regular websites, which raises Google’s estimation of your website’s quality.
2. Blogs with authors who are active in the online community tend to attract links pointing back to their blogs from other people’s websites, blogs, and forums.  This also helps improve your website’s search engine rankings, which is the basic idea of many link popularity services.
3. Blogging can help you get to know your readers and potential customers, perhaps even helping you to convince a reader and make a sale.

Cons of blogging:

1. Maintaining a blog is very time-consuming.  According to many experts, you need to update your blog at least three times a week in order for it to be even remotely successful.  Some business owners don’t have the time or the staff resources for this, and would rather pay someone else for their Internet marketing services.
2. Being active in the online community, also a necessity for a successful blog, is also time-consuming.  You will need to visit and comment on other blogs like yours, not spamming them but showing genuine interest in their blog topics, in order to gain new readers and links back to your blog.  Although this is free and may be appealing to the avid do-it-yourselfer, many business owners simply don’t have the time and resources, and prefer to hire a link building expert to get the same end results (lots of links back to your site).

It’s undeniable that blogging can benefit your business.  However, whether you opt to go that route yourself, or pay for someone else’s link building services, is completely up to you.