This is the second in a series of three guest posts over the coming few weeks by Graham Jones.

Graham is an Internet Psychologist and helps businesses profit from the internet using psychological principles.

Blogging is a business prerequisite, not a business elective. Not my words, but those of an editorial in Business Week magazine back in May 2005. That’s right; five years ago the world’s leading business magazine was saying that blogging was essential to your business. So, are you doing it?

Most businesses are not blogging, but those who have taken up writing blogs are amongst those which have seen considerable growth. Whether you look at the small business sector, or the global corporate arena, you’ll find that blogging features amongst the companies that have continued to grow well over the past few years.

Since Business Week made its pronouncement, a whole new world has opened up on the web, thanks to social networking and facilities like Twitter. Whether you consider things form a corporate reputation angle, or a marketing perspective, social media, and social networking in particular, are key components in modern business growth. The trouble is, how do you find time to use the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and so on?

The answer is blogging. If you don’t have a blog, the only presence you have in each of the social networks is the material you contribute directly to each individual system. That means you might need to pop along to Facebook to do some writing on people’s “walls”, before going over to Twitter to post some messages. When you get a moment, it’s off to LinkedIn, before going across to Ecademy to write something else. Before you know it, your day has been taken up with social networking and you’ve not completed any real work.

With blogging, though, everything is different. Write a blog and then by using a service such as HootSuite or Ping.fm your material can be added to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo! and 70 other different social networking and social media sites. You do one thing – and these automated services do the rest. The result is a presence on the web across multiple channels – but only if you have a blog.

Adding a blog to your website – or starting a separate blog – is the best thing you can do to help your business grow. By connecting your blog to all the leading social networking services you will get instant coverage the moment your write your blog. But without a blog, you face hours of hard work to achieve the same impact.

And once you have a blog, make sure you update it regularly. The more you write a blog, the better, as this will give your business greater coverage in a wide spectrum of places where your customers and potential customers can see you.

So, set a blogging plan in place, where you have a timetable for blogging; whether it’s once an hour, once a day or once a week doesn’t matter too much. What matters is that you are adding content to the internet using your blog on a regular basis and then reposting that content in social networking sites using automated systems. This is what some of the world’s leading businesses have done to achieve their growth in the past year or two. But without a blog, your business cannot easily emulate those companies which are succeeding online.

Graham Jones is an Internet Psychologist who helps businesses profit from the internet using psychological principles.

Check his site at http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/

or find him on the following social media sites:

http://twitter.com/grahamjones
http://facebook.com/internetpsychologist
http://linkedin.com/in/grahamjones

Thanks to Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com for the image