Are you blogging for business? If you aren’t, you might want to check in on what your competitors are blogging about these days. Blogging has become an essential part of how businesses market themselves and create relationships with customers online.

There are many ways to start a blog online for free, such as Blogger.com, BlogSpot.com, or WordPress.com. These are great options for individuals, groups, etc. They may not be the best options, though, for businesses looking to attract and engage new customers over the long term.

If you want to get serious about blogging for business, the resounding consensus is to use WordPress. There are two kinds of WordPress: WordPress.com (free hosted blog) and WordPress.org (host your WordPress blog on your own site). If you are serious, you want the latter. Even Matt Cutts, Google’s liaison on Search Engine Optimization info, doesn’t use Blogger.com (Google’s blogging platform); he uses WordPress – the .org version.

One of the benefits of putting a WordPress blog on your site is that it is completely open source and there is no end to the high-powered plug-ins you can add to it. Plug-ins are features that add a wide variety of administrative, functionality, and display options to your blog. When our clients get serious about blogging, we recommend the following, “must have” plug-ins for WordPress:

1. Let’s start with the one having universal appeal … WordPress Automatic Upgrade. If you have run a WordPress blog for more than a month or two, you’ve probably noticed that WordPress updates are never-ending. This tool walks you through a wizard that makes it very simple to update your blog, complete with database and file backups just in case.

2. Next: the most obvious to those who manage blogs … Akismet. This handy plug in is your greatest asset in combating spam. With or without it, you will get spammed on our blog. Akismet provides an excellent font line of defense, though, so much so that it ships with every download of WordPress. All you have to do is enable it.

3. What’s the point of blogging if no one can find you? All in One SEO Pack to the rescue! If you are blogging for business, then the whole point is to make the Search Engine Optimization of your blog as automated and easy to manage as possible. You’re taking the time to write timely, relevant content. You want to make sure your prospects can find it.

4. What’s the point of emailing subscribers if they won’t get your emails? WP-Mail-SMTP makes it much more likely that your emails will get through. The issue is a bit technical, but here is the quick and easy: If your blog sends out emails -- such as notifications of new blog posts, new comments to posts, or even just confirmations of subscription to your blog, then there is a good chance that most of the email sent out from your blog is landing in “junk mail” folders where your audience won’t ever see them unless you at least authenticated them against an SMTP account (a valid mail box accessed through a user name and password) on your host’s email server. By default, WordPress does not provide this. There are many other issues to consider here, but this is a definite first step.

5. The theme on any blog is essential. Your theme is the overall look and layout of your blog. Start with a theme that gives you tremendous control … Suffusion. If you are starting out, and especially if you don’t want to allocate much of a budget to the look of your blog, there are over a thousand themes available for free through WordPress.org. However, if you are looking to adapt a theme from your current website, or if you want a very strong starting place to customize your own theme, start with Suffusion. The tremendous power of this theme is not so much that it gives you a look for your site, but rather a truly in-depth power to control a tremendous number of aspects of that look -- right through the WordPress control panel.

Unfortunately, the print version of this article does not allow room for publishing links to the recommended plug-ins above, but here is how you can find them: Go to www.wordpress.org/extend/themes and search by the phases in bold above. And while you’re there, search and explore other add-ons you might find relevant to your business.

This only scratches the surface of the many “must have” WordPress add-ons. I hope others will contribute to this topic in this column with the add-ons they’ve found most valuable on the WordPress blogs they’ve worked up from that default “hello world” to a serious piece of online real estate that is a significant part of their business.

If you want to connect with others who are finding ways to make their businesses more interactive online, come and join us at the Redwood Technology Consortium.

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Space and the print medium does not make it possible to provide links to much of anything discussed here. Please see our blog at http://blog.WMSmerchantservices.com for a more interactive format. Sean Connors is the owner of and Chief Project Manager for Web Merchant Services and a business member of the Redwood Technology Consortium

Copyright 2010, Eureka Times-Standard Newspaper. The print version of this article first appeared in the 6/3/10 edition of the Times-Standard.