We have today published the results of our blogging survey and we were not surprised to discover that 70% of the small businesses we interviewed struggle to find the time to keep their blogs up-to-date.

We asked 125 small business owners about their blogging habits and found that, while 62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month. The remaining 71% have admitted they just weren’t able to find the time to maintain their blogs.

The survey focused almost exclusively on very small businesses, as these organisations tend not to be able to afford the ‘people power’ that larger businesses can leverage. 42% of our interviewees were one-man-bands; and a further 43% worked within organisations with 1-5 employees with the remaining 15% working for larger organisations.

The full release is available in our Press section. Please feel free to reproduce as long as Write My Site receives a credit and a link back to www.writemysite.co.uk.

As providers of blogging services it goes without saying that we’re super-keen on the idea of every business including a blog as part of their online strategy. Even if you’re not going to ask Write My Site to write it for you, here are the top five reasons why a blog is a great idea for your business:

1)    You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry

Christophe Langlois is a good example of this. His blog, Visible-Banking.com, is the leading independent blog focused on social media in banking and financial services. As a result, Christophe is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and other high profile events. At Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing conference last week, Christophe said none of this would have happened without his blog.

2)    Business blogging is a great way to gain a following of customers (and future customers)

If your content is interesting, people will come back to read more of it. Simple.

3)    The search engines – especially Google – love sites with regularly updated content.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) basically boils down to three things: one is having your site built in an SEO friendly way (talk to your web developer); the second is getting other sites to link to your site; and the third is fresh, unique content. A blog is the perfect way to achieve two out of these three aims: a good blog will not only provide the search engines with the regular content they’re looking for, it will also generate inbound links when other websites refer to your articles.

4)    Business blogs provide regular opportunities to use your keywords

Look at how many times you can see the words “business blog” in this article. It’s one of our keywords and as soon as this business blog post (see?) goes live, the post and its keywords will be indexed by Google.

5)    Blogs give you a great excuse to direct people towards your website

Write an interesting article for your business blog and then link to it from Twitter, Ecademy and online forums. It’s the perfect way to bring your website to the attention of potential customers.

We’ve put together a little survey for UK businesses in order to find out who’s blogging and how often they’re doing it.

The survey has been designed to help inform us about people’s views on business blogging. We want to know whether UK businesses see blogging as an important part of their search engine optimisation or PR strategies. We’re also interested in finding out whether the size or industries of the businesses who respond to the survey make a difference to the way blogging is viewed. The results so far are looking pretty interesting: many of our most enthusiastic business bloggers are in the professional services or marketing industries, and most are small businesses (fewer than 6 employees).

Plenty of studies have issued depressing findings about the number of abandoned blogs floating around in cyberspace, but based on the responses so far, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that in fact small businesses are well aware of the benefits of having a blog. Early results from our survey suggest that the only thing stopping small businesses from maintaining their blogs as often as they would like is time - very few people are of the opinion that a blog wouldn’t be beneficial to their business. In fact, even amongst the people who haven’t yet got a blog, the most common reason is simply that they haven’t yet found time to set it up. Of the people who do have a business blog, 70% said they update it less frequently now than they used to, because of time pressures – this certainly tallies with the most common reason people give for using our corporate blogging service!

We’ll be releasing more results as and when the number of respondents rises. If you’d like to take part, go to our online business blogging survey and fill out the ten questions on the form. It will take no more than five minutes of your time. Please feel free also to post your views about business blogging on this thread.