Blogging used to be seen as a social tool. It was a way of telling the world how you felt about things that mattered to you – and in a way that has never changed, even though many business owners have now cottoned on to the fact that blogging is a great way to attract new customers and visitors to their website.

The concept of blogging has clearly changed somewhat over the years, and while there are still people out there blogging about what matters to them, the format is now regularly bringing in fresh sales and new business to people who are players in the internet marketing field.

So why are blogs so popular in this way?

One of the main reasons is that online businesses have a tendency to be ‘faceless’. You cannot see the person or people behind that business and it can be all too easy to set up a bogus business that looks good on the outside but consists of nothing more than a way to fleece ordinary people of their cash.

Blogging helps to distinguish the honest traders from the bogus ones. It identifies those people who are passionate about their business and want to share the vast amounts of knowledge that they have on that subject.

This helps to establish trust between the business owner and their potential customers, and with links from their website to their blog they have an excellent chance of gaining new customers who don’t immediately buy something from the site, taking the time instead to explore first.

One of the advantages of having a blog as part of a website promotion drive is that blogs are generally viewed as being a ‘hands off’ form of promotion. They don’t directly try to sell to the customer in the same way that a website does; instead they strengthen the business by allowing the potential customer to find out more about that business and the person (or people) who runs it.

Most business bloggers do still have links from their blog back to their website, and they will also indulge in deep linking to pages within the site instead of constantly linking back to the home page all the time. This in turn helps the blog to build more backlinks to different areas of the website, building an even better chance of attracting more customers from the search engines, even though they won’t directly visit the blog at all.

It is perhaps ironic that a blog which is designed to help an online business develop and increase its profits doesn’t actually have to sell very hard at all. In the end it is all about adding depth and value to an online business – in effect the owner is taking the opportunity to show his or her potential clients that they know a great deal about what they do and can help their clients or customers accordingly.

In the end, a blog certainly can be a selling tool, but it is often one step removed from the selling process itself.

One of the joys of finally being able to give up your day job and devote yourself to your online business full time is being to arrange your day as you see fit. If you never liked getting up at 7am or earlier to head out and go shoulder to shoulder (or bumper to bumper) with everyone else, then having your own internet business can be the perfect alternative.

But working from home comes with its own set of challenges. People find that not only do they have to constantly think about web promotion issues to make sure their business develops and is seen by plenty of other people, they also have to make sure they put the required hours in to keep the money rolling in.

There tends to be two main groups of people that are identifiable when we look at anyone who has started their own internet marketing business. Some people are so delighted at finally being able to work from home that they don’t actually put the hours in at all. Temptation is all around them with household jobs to be done and all kinds of interruptions on top. The second group goes completely in the opposite direction – they are so delighted to be working on what they want to do that they rarely give themselves any time off.

While some people do try to stick to regular hours it is clearly not always possible to do so when you are the boss. If an urgent job comes in or there is something that needs doing before you finish for the day then it is up to you to get it done. It might not always be what you want to do but the days when you could leave work anyway and pass it on to someone else are over when you are responsible for your own business. It’s clear that finding smarter ways to work is crucial if you are one of those people who are likely to work all hours if you aren’t held in check.

Some internet business owners are certainly workaholics but they do enjoy their business. The internet is such a thriving and fast developing place that it is easy to spend hours just gathering information, quite apart from doing any actual solid work.

Normal business hours don’t tend to apply to online businesses; if you have a website then that will be online and open for business twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. That applies even if the owner isn’t online.

What you do tend to find is that night owls will structure their day so that they do all their work in the evening and during the night, when they are at their most alert. Early birds will be up and working at 6am or even earlier. In this sense although many internet business owners do try and stick to firm working hours, they don’t tend to be the nine to five hours that employees are used to.

You don’t need to venture too far during a surfing session online to come across a few blogs of one kind or another. It seems like everyone is doing it – no matter what subject you can think of, it’s a safe bet that at least one person somewhere in the world has felt the need to start a blog on that very subject, no matter how obscure it might be.

But while we often hear about the explosion in blogging that has occurred over the last few years, the unsuccessful nature of many blogs and bloggers doesn’t tend to hit so many headlines. There must be millions of blogs that have been started in a fit of excitement, only to be abandoned after the creator ran out of ideas for posts and lost interest in the subject altogether.

So why is it that there are so many unattended blogs out there, and so many people running very quickly in the other direction?

The main reason is probably due to the myriad of e-books available today that tell you all about the vast amounts of money that can be made from blogging. Now while that is true there is one thing that needs to be added to the mix if you are to develop a successful blog – and that is effort. After all, you want your blog to be found and liked by other people otherwise you aren’t going to make any money or attract any readers.

And this is where most people fall down. The dream of someone writing something amazing and posting it to their blog so that millions of people will jump to read it just doesn’t happen very often. If it does, you can bet the blogger concerned did their homework and learned to use good SEO techniques to attract the attention of the search engines and pull in new readers.

And you can also be sure it didn’t happen overnight.

That’s why we will continue to see a community of non-bloggers who have blogged once or twice and then given it all up as a waste of time. It’s anyone’s guess how many people have started blogs with one of the free providers and then let them founder. There are probably plenty more people who went one step further as well, getting their own domain names and hosting and setting up their own site before letting it sit still in cyberspace with only the barest handful of posts on it to excite anyone who happens to pass by on their journeys. Website promotion doesn’t seem to be on the top of many bloggers lists of things to do.

The percentage of unsuccessful bloggers out there depends on which site you go to and which source you read, but the general consensus is that it’s somewhere around the ninety per cent plus mark. Maybe that figure should be presented as a cautionary tale to those who are thinking of making their own splash in the blogging world, before they actually do it.