I had an email conversation with Anita Campbell, co-editor of the Small Business Trends blog. She had some good advice for me, which I think is worth your reading. Here is some of what Anita had to say about small businesses and blogs. . .

In my view, the really small businesses -- the SOHO's and those with under, say, 20 employees -- can benefit the most from blogs. They're the ones with the most limited financial and people resources. They need the viral marketing punch the most. It's a reverse leverage thing. The smaller you are, the more benefit you get from blogs.

I actually think large corporations won't get as much benefit marketing-wise from having their own blogs -- they'll benefit more from leveraging other people's blogs for word-of-mouth buzz.

But for small businesses, a blog helps level the playing field. It will drive traffic to them, get people interested in their products, and generally get them more attention than any other method on the web that I can think of. Consider this: my Small Business Trends blog gets more traffic in a day than my commercial consulting website gets in an entire month -- several months actually. If you plug my name into Google, my blog comes up before my commercial website -- and my name is my URL!

One thing you might consider is developing a true directory of business blogs. It's been attempted in a couple of places, but no one has really scratched the surface of the business blogs out there, as far as I am aware. (I'm taking her up on that proposition, as it is part of the reason I transitioned the focus of this blog.)