Having a blogsite is the most important tool you can have in your effort to get and maintain your online visibility.

By their very nature, blogs they are highly optimized marketing machines. They are more highly optimized than websites, for example, because the search engines love new information and websites tend to be complicated and usually static (stagnant).

Blogs however, are updated frequently and with every blog post you add to your blog, the bots are sent out from the search engines looking for this new and fresh information to catalogue.

WordPress is one of several blogging platforms (software products), but is considered the best by many. It is free, often included in the features of hosting companies, easy to install onto your domain, and is highly expandable.

There are numerous plugins (software) that you can install easily that add functionality to your blog. A couple of very important ones come to mind immediately, and they are Google Analytics and Technorati Tags.

Google Analytics is a plugin that compiles all kinds of information about who, what, where, when, and why people look at your site. It compiles this information into easy to understand graphs and lists so that you can tweak and make changes to your site based on what the viewers want.

Technorati is a search engine for blogs that keeps track of blogs and grades their popularity. You want to optimize your site for this search engine and the Technorati Tags plugin helps you to do this by adding tags to each bit of information you add to your blog.

There are many plugins-some let you add video, music, audio, forms, and so on. The list grows daily because there are dedicated people working behind the scenes to create plugins, and they then offer them for free to the WordPress community.

Widgets also add functionality to your site, and these little gems are built into WordPress software and you only have to activate them. They have specific tasks, such as creating a space to archive and access your past blog posts. It will then show up in the sidebar of your blog as a drop down menu so the viewer only has to click on that to find any blog post you have ever written. But this is only one example-there are many.

Consider having a WordPress blog created for you, or try to get one up on the net yourself. End that long, painful, and expensive relationship with your webmaster once and for all.