I found these staggering statistics recently -

 Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.

 More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.

 Over 57 million Americans read blogs.

 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.

 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.

 9% of internet users say they have created blogs.

 Six percent of the entire US adult population has created a blog .

 Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs .

 over 120 thousand blogs are created every day .

 There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day .

 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs .

 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006 .

 51% of blog readers shop online .

 Blog readers average 23 hours online each week .

Regularly update your blog to provide relevance, ease of use and functionaliy to the site. Add a share / bookmark feature to enable your viewers to link your content.

Noteable Bookmarks to enable:

Favorites
Del.icio.us
Yahoo MyWeb
Live Bookmarks
Faves.com
myAOL
Simpy
Diigo
Spurl
Backflip
Segnalo
Feed Me LinksGoogle Bookmarks
Furl
Newsvine
Yahoo Bookmarks
Ask
Fark
Mister Wong
Blogmarks
LinkaGoGo
Magnolia
Netvouz

Noteable Social Web sites to enable:

Digg
Reddit
MySpace
Slashdot
Tailrank
TechnoratiFacebook
StumbleUpon
Twitter
Propeller
DropJack
BlinkList

Include an option to email articles of interest with their friends or colleagues. Plus, provide coding to link to YOUR blog from your website.

What’s behind the rapid growth of blogs?

One of the reasons for the rapid growth of blogs is their versatility. They differ from mainstream corporate websites as they project a personal touch (often from the CEO or owner). This portrays that corporation as more approachable and encourages dialog. There’s a certain depth and breadth to blogs not found elsewhere. The more successful corporate blogs encourage participation from every employee, from sales to customer support. Corporations are team efforts - more than the sum of its parts. Encourage participation from your clients and prospective clients. No one can know everything, but together you can learn volumes.

- Steve

Interesting stats Steve, I love it. Can you tell us where you got the stats? Any link or report? I believe everything in those stats to be true, people spend A LOT of time online reading blogs etc - just love to be able to put a research company or report to go with it.

Yeah, thanks for sharing these stats but where did you get these stats?

Found these stats on Blog World Expo

Hi Steve,

Can you suggest a few popular sites for Blogging???

Your best bet is to incorporate a blog on your own site, and encourage your clients to participate, either through email campaigns or newsletters. The important thing is to be consistent, be relevant, and don't come across as advertising. Search engines index active blogs, which in turn exposes more prospects to your services.

One that comes to mind as a good reference(rules I guess) is Matt Heaton's blog. Mostly business, but personal rants from time to time. It's entertaining and informative enough that I've followed it for years. That would be my goal, a good following of participants.

Just read through a few of his posts. He's certainly very successful and writes some great stuff. I've marked his blog as a favorite.

With the blogsphere getting more and more crowded, I think it takes more than just hard work to be a successful blogger. By the way, there's another good read at Technorati on the subject and I hope Steve don't mind me dropping a link here: http://technorati.com/blogging/state...e-blogosphere/

Hi all,

Blogs are really important for attracting and directing visitors to your hosting site. Provide important information related to web hosting, domains etc. But be sure to optimize the blog as well. Otherwise no matter how much valuable it contains no will find it.

Suggestions:
Optimize title, meta description and keyword tags
Submit it to major search engines like google, yahoo, msn, live, ask
Submit it to blog directories and directories
Connect with other bloggers

See what I mean? You've marked him as a favorite. It takes a very impressive site to get into my bookmarks.

Agreed. To be successful, you should surround yourself or emulate others who are successful. I don't agree with everything in his blog, but I will read every post.

nice share but can you please mention the the source of you info

@neteater - I did mention it earlier - Blog World Expo