Whether you've just started a blog to help promote your business or your employer has been speaking with you about launching a company blog, it’s absolutely true that a blog can help a business grow. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post right now!

While blogs have long since passed their stage of being nothing more than personal journals, there's still a lot of confusion about how to blog the right way. This is especially true for businesses who want to get on board with blogging. To get the most out of the time you spend blogging, make sure you avoid these common business blogging mistakes:

We like to think that content is king, and to some extent, that’s true. But great content can’t overcome a poor blog design. The design is the thing that sucks visitors in. It creates the first impression. If your design sucks, chances are people will back out of your blog.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be some genius WordPress theme designer to create a good looking blog. You just need to avoid these mistakes, and you should be headed in the right direction.

I keep hearing a lot of talk these days about how businesses would love to increase traffic to their web site, so I’m going to share 4 more ways that I’ve found to be very effective.

1. Blogging - It doesn’t take an award winning creative copywriter to write short articles about your product or service. All it takes is a little time researching a topic and then writing an article that will be of interest to your target market. Basically anyone can write and submit blog articles, but if you post quality articles on your blog, you will attract the right type of visitors to your web site and establish yourself and your company as an expert in your field.

Vlogging - You can also do video blogs or “vlogging” to engage your audience. With the advent of high-speed internet and social media networks, vlogging has become a great way to stay in front of your target audience.

Blog Comments – In order to get feedback from your customers and those who peruse your site, you have to add Blog Commenting to your web traffic game plan. On any blog, you will almost always find a "comments" link at the end of each post, which encourages dialogue between other consumers and the producers themselves. This dialogue keeps the discussion fresh and friendly and adds a human element to the World Wide Web.