A blog makes a perfect home-away-from-homepage anchor for all your social marketing initiatives. You can tweet more than 140 characters at a time in a blog. You can get stumbled upon by others with a blog. And you will find many friends and would-be friends by way of a blog.

Again, I have to ask, why isn’t your online business blogging if you’re out there in the socialsphere? So I did.

Surprisingly, a few of those responding said, “I don’t know how to blog” or “I don’t know what a blog is.” For the dwindling minority of business people who live in a Web -1.0 cave, I usually take them to a blog search engine and pop in a rival’s names just to get their attention and show them what a blog is.

I also offer take them to Blogger and get them up and blogging in about 10 minutes. After pointing out that it’s much better to blog for your organization rather than for another, we start to talk about their real business barriers to blogging.

The most frequently mentioned barriers to blogging are content creation, time, and money. Many organizations seem to believe that creating good, interesting content takes too much time, and if it takes too much time, it takes too much money.

Let’s put time and money aside for a moment and talk about content creation first by answering the following questions:

* Do you publish an e-mail newsletter?

* Do you sell stuff?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you have something to blog about…

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Facebook Inc. said it has acquired FriendFeed, a start-up that allows users to share links and status updates online, folding in a potential rival that struggled to take off.

Facebook paid nearly $50 million for the company, in a combination cash and stock offer, according to people familiar with the matter. The company paid roughly $15 million in cash, with the rest in Facebook stock that vests over several years and would be worth roughly $32.5 million based on the $6.5 billion common valuation an investor recently placed on the company. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by four former Google Inc. software engineers as a way for users to keep track of their friends’ activities across social-media services — like Facebook and Twitter — at the same time. But it never expanded far beyond a core group of Internet professionals, particularly as other services like Facebook made it easier for users to share their articles, photos and notes across multiple social-media services.

In an interview, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said that both companies have been casually talking about joining forces for a while, but that talks really accelerated “in the past week.”

All 12 FriendFeed employees and the founders, will join the company — a boost to Facebook’s cadre of engineering talent. Mr. Taylor said the team is likely to work on the technology that allows Web developers to integrate features of Facebook onto their own sites. Facebook has been pushing those tools to make it easier for users to keep in touch with their friends when they aren’t on Facebook. But the efforts are still in an early phase.

Mr. Taylor, who also declined to comment on the terms of the deal, said Facebook will continue to operate FriendFeed.com as a standalone site for now but aims to eventually integrate the products.

In the past year, Facebook has matched a number of features from FriendFeed, whose technology — including the speed at which it updates — have received strong reviews from industry professionals. But after swift growth, FriendFeed’s traffic has seesawed. It had 989,000 unique users in June, according to comScore, compared to Facebook’s 340 million. Facebook last year failed to acquire Twitter — a microblogging service which, like FriendFeed, enables users to share links and content online.

Monday, Facebook also launched a feature that lets users search the stream of items their friends share or other users make public for terms like celebrities or news events. Previously, most of the search functionality Facebook built for the site was focused on finding particular people.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

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Personally, I have an enormous amount of important pictures, videos and documents and I save all of them in social bookmarking sites. Now, you might wonder what social bookmarking is. Wikipedia defines it as, “A method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of webpages on the internet with the help of metadata.”

In other words, it is a method used to save and store online information or webpages for future reference. It also helps you share links with your contacts. There are many social bookmarking sites like digg, delicious, stumbleupon, etc. you can use for this purpose.

Here are some benefits of social bookmarking you should consider…

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1. It says in their terms of service that they can cancel your blog without warning if they don’t agree with the content. This is even true with MLM and network marketing blogs as they think that they are scams.

2. You do not own the content with wordpress.com. Instead they own it and can do with it what they please…..

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The Analytics360 Plugin provides a comprehensive view of a blog’s performances, allowing publishers to quickly identify which posts are enjoying the most inbound traffic whether from web site referrals or by email. The traffic-over-time chart shows when a post was published or an email campaign was sent in relation to the numbers of site visits, giving a clear view on cause and effect…..

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Blogging can be one of the most effective marketing tools for the small business owner. It’s easy to start, it’s easy to maintain and it’s easy to leverage in enhancing your marketing mix.

To that end, here are 11 reasons why your business needs a blog:

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Of all the successful blogs on the Internet, hundreds more have failed. Running a blog is like running a business website. Unless you are willing to put the time in and treat it seriously, you won’t be blogging long.

That is not to say that the failed bloggers weren’t serious about blogging. Mostly, new bloggers aren’t prepared for the work that goes into creating a successful blog. Just building the blog doesn’t mean that people will necessary come to you. You pursue the audience and give them a reason to see what you have to say.

1. Fresh Content – no one wants to visit a blog day after day and see the same posts. Update your blog content at least twice a week. This will be easier if you write several posts ahead of time and upload them at the appropriate times.

2. Article Marketing – the niche you’ve chosen for your blog is one that interests you. If it is interesting you will spend more time doing it. Create content not only for your blog but also to be submitted to article directories. Use the resource box to advertise your blog so people can find you.

3. Social Networking – these sites are everywhere. Join Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Twitter or a dozen others and make connections. You can join groups of likeminded people who are also bloggers or entrepreneurs.

4. Viral Marketing – this is where you spread the word about your blog. Talk to friends, family and even strangers. Give out business cards that have your blog address on them.

5. Use RSS Feeds – RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Readers can subscribe to your feed and get email updates when new content is posted. It is an easy way for them to keep up with your blog without spending all day online.

6. Submit Blog to Search Engines – doing this allows your blog to be ranked. Google and Yahoo! are two of the most popular search engines you want to crawl your blog pages. It doesn’t guarantee top ranking, though. You’ll have to do a little more work for that.

7. Joining Forums – as a blogger you are a budding entrepreneur. Right now you are marketing yourself to find traffic and then profit. Become a member of business forums, work at home forums and others to meet new people and share ideas. You can add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can find you.

8. Visit other blogs – show your appreciation to those who visit you by also posting comments on their blogs. It is a kindness that shows others you are not just out to advertise your blog alone. Add links to your blog in your comments.

9. SEO Marketing – whatever you write, use relevant keywords. Keyword density between three and ten percent is good for getting higher page rankings in search engines. Base your keywords on a research you do to find the most popular words used in search engines for your niche.

10. Social Bookmarking – submitting posts to social bookmarking sites allows others who are members of those sites to track you back to your blog.

Using any of these ideas will start the blog traffic moving in your direction. It takes time through internet and social marketing, but you will build the readership you want.

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