Yes, it can - if you do it and do it strategically. What do I mean by this?

Be Personable.
Blogging affords you to share about your business using a 'personal voice'. Shelf the corporate speak - leave that for your corporate website. So if you do blog, be personable. If you have team members involved in 'group blogging', then it can come alive with the different personalities and writing styles.

Embrace Feedback.
Wordpress ® blogs are built with comment capabilities. Ask for comments from your readers. Request their feedback on your latest blog entry. Acknowledge their response to your initiatives, product launches, service programs. Embrace their feelings about how your company is portrayed in the marketplace. This is your acres of diamonds in your backyard. The pulse of your readership. It's priceless and should be encouraged and treasured.

Be Consistent.
It helps to be regular and consistent. You may not have a chance to do it everyday or every week - that's ok. Just keep to a schedule.

Or, you can also post-date several tips or articles (which Wordpress ® can easily equip you to accomplish this task of post-dating) ahead of time, so that your blog is delivering fresh content and value to your readership. This way, you're leveraging technology to help you be consistent.

Add Value.
Put yourself in your readers' shoes. Can you offer them 'value' upfront which may lead them to consider you an expert or 'thought leader' in your space, potentially leading them back to you when they're ready to purchase a solution your company offers? Consider that a majority of web surfers research for information, and if you're in a position to add value first, before they add value to you in terms of being a subscriber or customer, then do this and it'll turn out to be a fantastic ROI for you.

Whether you're blogging for a not-for-profit or a for-profit, blogging can make your job easier to get more visitors, sales and profits - and most times, better and faster.

Case Study: LuckyOliver.com

(ClickTracks case study about LuckyOliver.com)

Here's the summary of the case study:

- LuckyOliver.com is a stock photography company that offers designers, small business owners, consultants and marketers an affordable resource for finding the perfect royalty-free image. With high-resolution images starting as low as $1, LuckyOliver offers a viable alternative to high priced stock photography and low-quality free images.

- Their founder, Bryan Zmijewski, delegated his team to deploy a blog and to blog as a team (adding posts, replying to comments and encouraging interaction).

- They had dozens of blog posts but received zero comments:

"When we first started the blog, I encouraged all of the LuckyOliver staff to post, at least once or more a week. And they did—but after two weeks of posting, I found myself relatively alone on the blog. When I asked folks why they weren't posting, they told me that they had other things to do and didn't think anyone was reading the blog anyway. I think that the initial lack of comments was discouraging to them, so I had to figure out if the blog really was valuable, even if no one was actively commenting."

- People were reading the blog, but Bryan focused on one particular metric: Average time on site.

"Over the years, I've found Average Time on Site (ATOS) to be a real indicator of how interested people are in your product or service....I set up a label that tracked everyone who had visited the blog page. Then I compared visitors who saw the blog page with visitors who didn't. Even I was surprised by the results -- people who read the blog spend about 60% more time on the site than people who didn't."

- Bryan shared this news with the team, and blog posts increased.

- Bryan decided to kick it up a notch. He wanted to know if the blog had a direct correlation to their site's sign up activity. Were visitors who read the blog more or less likely to sign up for a LuckyOliver account?

- The result? A visitor who saw the blog was 22% more likely to sign up for a LuckyOliver account than one who hadn't. Additionally, the average time on site and number of page views for those newly signed up blog viewers was double that of the average visitor.

As you just read, blogging does improve your readership and average time on site, which leads to conversions of sales and profits. It's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Next step ...

Now you know how blogging can increase visitors, sales and profits, what platform should you use to blog? I recommend using Wordpress ®.