Skill number five is something that may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you - the ability to setup and post to a blog.

Blogs are fast becoming an invaluable online business tool that your clients may want to consider if they don’t have one already.

A blog is a great ‘environment’ to collect the most important asset that our clients have - their thoughts and expertise. With a blog your clients are able to capture their thoughts ‘on the fly’ in the form of posts to the blog. And blog posts are meant to be super simple and conversational, just write down what you have to say and done.

If your client has a blog it can also make the newsletter writing process much easier. For example, whenever I need to send out a newsletter I first check my recent postings at my blog www.onlinebusinessmanager.com/blog. I’ll pick one that I like, maybe expand on it a bit and send it out to my list.

Much easier than trying to come up with a topic from scratch for each newsletter issue.

Also, with a blog your clients can get better positioning in the search engines for their websites. One of the things that search engines consider in ranking websites is how often a site is updated with new information. With regular posts to a blog your clients’ websites are being updated on a regular basis, which makes their site look super appealing to the search engines! Gotta love that.

Blogs are also wonderful tools to create online membership/client areas for your clients. In fact, we use blogs to manage all of our member sites at MultipleStreamsofCoachingIncome.com and with other clients. This type of blog does require some technical expertise to setup (we hire a blog programmer for this) but once it is setup it is easy to use and a great way to share resources with clients.

And hey, you know what? Any of the stuff we have been talking about to date can also apply to your own VA business. But of course!

So this week I invite you to take a step for yourself.

Start a blog for your business and make at least 2 posts this week.

You can sign up for a reasonably priced blog at www.typepad.com or www.blogger.com.