Blogs have several advantages over other types of sites, even if they are no longer ‘cool’ like they were a couple years ago. First, they are convenient. Using blog software like Wordpress provides you with a database-driven, modularly designed site within minutes of setting it up.

You don’t have to have all of the content ready-to-go on startup, in fact you are expected to add content a little at a time. You can use available layouts, or design your own — or any combination of the two.

There are features like pings and trackback, that help you promote the site, built right in. With Wordpress, there is even a feature that lets you post a weeks worth (or months worth) of messages at once, and they will appear on a daily basis, just as if you were really working.

Think of blogging software as a type of content management system — you do not need to have a subject oriented to current-news or your personal views. Any subject can be covered in a blog. Nor are there any rules about the frequency with which you post new content. Of course you will want to start with daily posts to get the search engine’s attention, but once you have twenty or thirty pages of content, you can begin posting more sporadically. When you have hundreds of pages, you can stop posting completely, and the search engines will continue to serve up your content in response to corresponding queries for months or years to come, just as with any other type of website. When a blog has a couple hundred pages, I like to add just one per month, to keep it from being dropped from RSS feed aggregators as inactive.

If you are building a Web Empire, you will want to include blogs in your network of sites. One good technique for extra links under your control, is to offer to make blogs for friends and relatives who aren’t tech-savvy. You should have hosting accounts on one or more servers that allow multiple (or even unlimited) add-on domains. You can register a domain for the blog, set up the software, and give the person whose blog it will be posting rights.

Or, if the ten dollars a year for a domain is too much for your friend or relative who wants to try blogging, you can put their blog on a  sub-domain of one of your existing domains. Then put links to your other blogs in the blogroll for the new blog. Edit the copyright notice to add a link to one of your sites. Put ads in the side-bar for your own products or services, or for affiliate products.

It’s win-win, they get a free blog, and you get extra in-coming links to your sites.

In addition to personal blogs where you have others doing the posting, you can have topical blogs where you post all the information. On these sites I look for public domain content, or subjects that require only minor editing, so I can post five pages within an hour or two. I set the posts dates for Monday through Friday if the blog is new, later cut back to Mon-Weds-Fri then weekly and finally monthly when the site is mature.

Choose topics that relate only peripherally to your main theme. So, if your main subject area is, say, Chicago area real-estate, you can have blogs on Chicago restaurants, other real-estate markets, tips on repairing a fixer-upper, how to make money buying and selling real-estate, Chicago tourist attractions, managing rental properties, etc., etc. Link all of these to your Chicago real-estate site, and the search engines will see them as relevant (because they are), you will get traffic through each of them and at the same time improve the ranking of your main site.

Do NOT link back to these sites from your main site. Do not link to all of them from each of the others. Have a few links from one to one or two others. If you have other, non-blog sites in your network, a few links to and from those will help. Use different link texts and keep things varied, so it doesn’t look like a network.