Title: Company Blogs Word Count: 522 Summary: Of the top 500 companies in the USA only 40 have a company blog. The reasons for this are not yet clear, however some speculate that marketing agencies do not have enough domain specific knowledge to truly comprehend the value of a company blog from a PR, branding and direct sales perspective. According to Bill Gates a company blog provides opportunities for companies to establish opinion and thought, whilst creating a “human face” to an organization. Speaking with a bl... Keywords: blogging,blog,blogs,management,marketing,link popularity, Article Body: Of the top 500 companies in the USA only 40 have a company blog. The reasons for this are not yet clear, however some speculate that marketing agencies do not have enough domain specific knowledge to truly comprehend the value of a company blog from a PR, branding and direct sales perspective. According to Bill Gates a company blog provides opportunities for companies to establish opinion and thought, whilst creating a “human face” to an organization. Speaking with a blog consultant may help to explain the true ROI that can be gained through effective blog management and implementation; a company blog is an effective SEM (search engine marketing) tool that establishes authority and provides direct sales conversions. With the rise in social blogging, the commercial sector is set to follow, with companies such as Microsoft already realizing and experiencing the benefits of a company blog. They are able to respond to news as and when it happens, they are able to attain feedback on products, and they have also created a sales platform that speaks with millions of highly targeted customers. With blog consulting services from search marketing agencies and SEO copywriting firms, the future of commercial blogging will be less about public relations and far more about link building and SEO (search engine marketing). Many companies are finding that a company blog is another sales channel that enters markets that their sales domain cannot enter. Let’s think about a man who is getting started online - he approaches a website design company and commissions a website design. After two months online, he is disappointed to discover that he attains zero visitors, let alone conversions, through his website. He starts to look towards marketing, and wants to find out how he can rank his website higher in the search engines. Is this man specifically looking for an SEO company? No. Despite this an SEO company may have a company blog, and they could provide the basic information that is needed to convert this man into a sales lead through taking an authoritative stance. Through speaking with a blog consultant it is possible to establish an idea of the results that you will attain, and the blog management services that are available to you. A competent blog consulting service should penetrate far less competitive markets than search engines, with blog specific directories and engines providing a format by which leads are less targeted, yet less competitive. With the recent upsurge of company blogging amongst small and medium size businesses, many are opting for more than one blog on the back of the results that they have attained. Through spreading a message across multiple blogs they are able to represent different angles and keyword phrases in a manner that would be impractical on a sales page. As link building becomes a more exhaustive and costly task, blogging is an area of the web, where savvy webmasters show a more kind-hearted approach to providing links. A blog can be positioned within or out with a company’s primary domain name, meaning that any residual page rank can be distributed to the sales page from highly content-relevant material.