The recent post at Business Blog Summit – Starting a business blog: what does your next web site need to do? – highlights a topic that small business owners should consider as they look at launching or re-launching a business website. The variety of functionality that most businesses seem to want are, in fact, found in blogging tools. The trick is explaining this functionality in terms that business owners can both appreciate and apply to their marketing and e-commerce needs.

It is tempting to go into great detail about the amazing features of systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal that enable the sharing of website content in various formats. However, I think the more relevant conversation is looking at how these tools can offer a means to put content on the internet and facilitate its update on a regular basis. Small business owners are busy enough without having to view their website as yet another “ball” that they have to keep in the air while running their business.

I was recently contacted by a family friend and asked to comment on a layout and draft content design for his blog. This was a nice compliment since I am still working on getting my blog designed and (hopefully) read by at least a few people. It was pretty educational to try and provide recommendations on how my friend could plan content, try and build links with other blogs, and even come up with the right name for his blog.

One big question was how much he should emphasize messages of self-promotion on his site while trying to balance it with offering some conversation and free services. My suggestion was that he consider putting the services that visitors could benefit from as the core part of the blog and then build in self-promotion as a normal part of engaging with visitors via comments and regular blog entries. The best part of the blog, in my opinion, is that it is about writing and targeted at writers. With this kind of focus it shouldn’t be too hard to keep the entries fresh and really build a regular set of visitors.

In trying to figure out what it is that writers write about online I came across such sites as Keep Writing, Writers Online and several other freelance writer-related domains that were simply parked and had no content. It seems like there is a proliferation of well-intended writers who have gone out and purchased domains but then have failed to follow through with the tricky part of actually writing content. It seems a bit ironic that writers, or their proxies, are able to imagine having a website but then fail to actually make it happen. To be fair, I went on to blogger.com and did some searching and came across such blogs as Freelance Content Writing, Content Done Better and Writer’s Weekly. These seem to have a bit more ‘on the ball’ than other sites I have come across.

The bottom line is that there is plenty of room in the blogosphere for some more well-written and intelligently tagged blogs and sites about writing. I think my friend’s blog will be a welcome addition to the online community and as soon as he gets it up and running I will be one of the first to put his feed on my blogroll.