Do you blog?

The number of people that answer that question with a “yes” continues to grow.

Blogging can look really different depending on who’s doing it.  A blog that’s mostly meant as a fun way to work out your thoughts or track your experiences on vacation will provide a different experience than the blogs meant to help promote a business. Even within the latter category though, how people blog varies.

To get a clearer picture of what business blogging looks like, Orbit Media took a survey. What they found, as expected, is that there’s a wide variety in how bloggers blog. Even so, they were able to pull out a few key trends in the blogging process.

• Most bloggers spend less than 2 hours on each post, but it’s not unheard of to spend over 6 hours.
• Bloggers don’t keep normal business hours. They write whenever they can fit it in, or when an idea hits.
• Most bloggers work from a home office.
• Many bloggers publish new posts multiple times a week.
• Few bloggers have editors.
• The main blogging promotion tools used are social media and SEO.

Not too many of those surveyed were freelance bloggers, but the survey findings match my experiences pretty well.

There’s no one right way to blog. Anyone who works in a creative field knows that you just have to figure out what works best for you.

If you want your blog to succeed as a business tool though, there are a few key things you need to keep in mind.

• You need to blog with a strategy.
• You need to make an effort to promote your blog posts.
• You need to make sure you’re blogging for your audience, not yourself.

For a more in depth look at what you need to do to build a more successful business blog, download the Austin Copywriter report on the subject.

So what about you? How do you blog?