The survey of 125 small business owners published today by SEO copywriting company Write My Site shows that 62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites. Nevertheless, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month, with the remaining 71% admitting that their blogs have fallen by the wayside.

Emily Hill, Write My Site’s MD, says: “When a blog hasn’t been updated for several weeks or months it looks unprofessional – people tend to be relieved to learn they can offload the time-consuming task of keeping their blogs up-to-date.”

If blogs are such a hassle to maintain, why bother having them at all? In a word: traffic. Google and the other search engines pay great attention to sites that regularly add original – and relevant – content. Digital marketing industry body Econsultancy has used its own blog to urge small businesses to take advantage of this simple SEO strategy: “We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorise and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this.”

Hill supports this view: “We have seen for ourselves the benefits of a well-written blog: our own traffic has increased by more than 200% since we bolted a blog onto our website,” she says. “Better still, the traffic is completely targeted: all of our increased hits and enquiries are from people who have found Write My Site by running searches on our keywords.”

Wise up to PR. Mother of two and PR guru Antonia Chitty advises women with small businesses. Here are her top five tips:

1. Get inspired. Join online business forums, or find a parenting website with a section for work-from-home mothers like www.mumszone.co.uk, www.netmums.co.uk or www.babygreenhouse.co.uk.
2. List all your ideas for promotion on a wall planner so you have activities planned for each week. By planning ahead you’ll see when you need to start promoting an event you are attending, for example.
3. Do one PR task every day. Even when you are very busy, find 15 minutes to make a call or send an email. Attacking promotion in small chunks makes it more manageable
4. Build up good contacts in the media. Call journalists to find out what sort of story they want and send out press releases on a regular basis. It can take several mentions of your business name before people start to buy.
5. Cultivate your customers. Every time someone buys from you, ask if you may add them to your mailing list. Send regular newsletters to clients and potential customers so they know about your sales, events and promotions.

Something to think about over Christmas perhaps! 

The book is very practical, and you can see that Jones has years of experience in the media. She has written for local papers, worked in PR, and currently freelances for a range of newspapers and magazines. Buy the book if you want to get paid for writing, and need some pointers about the best way to achieve this. It will be £6.99 well invested.

Other useful books for aspiring writers which I’d recommend:

The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, The Writer’s Handbook, and the Media Directory are all handy references. Each has its strong points, they all have good information written by well informed people in the media, and will clue you in on how to get started. If you want to find a media contact the guides can be a starting place, although as they only come out once a year contacts may not be up to date.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. Every time you add something like a blog, or set up a profile on a new networking site, you will definitely reach new people. Actively networking on Facebook by joining relevant groups, or linking up with likeminded folk on MySpace will put your business name in front of people who haven’t come across it before. But there’s not guarantee that this will lead to sales. Michelle Lawrie, who runs babysigning company Chelltune set up a MySpace page and says, “I haven’t looked there for weeks. I did get a phone call from a chap who had found my site from MySpace but it hasn’t resulted in any sales to my knowledge.”

However, what you are doing, is building potential customers for the future. The users of many social networking sites tend to be in the 16 to 30 age group. Michelle says, “I’ve had plenty of hits from Facebook but again no sales. I am yet to see if it is worth while or not. I’ve had more sales from forums such as those aimed at Childminders.”

And people who see your MySpace page may not be looking at some of the other media you use to reach new customers. Like every promotional activity, neither Facebook nor MySpace nor the best blog in the world will give you a booming business on their own. Successful business promotion is based on lots of small bits of promotional activity.