Along with useful content, authorship of blog postings by top management is important because it give readers a chance to see the company's guiding personalities in an informal way. In some cases, in an effort to maintain a healthy distance from a company's products and services, management-level bloggers operate their blogs separately from their companies.

Such is the case with Alec Saunders, chief executive of Ottawa, Canada-based iotum, which develops software for telephone networks. Saunders maintains a personal blog, which he bills as "Alec Saunders' Personal Soapbox, an explosive mix of VOIP, technology and the Web." Saunders makes clear that the opinions are his own.

"It's my personal blog and you'll find me commenting on telephony things, what's going on the Web... and you'll see my vacation," he says. The blog, which sometimes mentions iotum, helps generate interest in the company because of Saunders' reputation in the software industry, where he spent a good portion of his career at Microsoft Corp.

Methods to generate blog traffic are varied. Some companies like to send proactive "push" e-mails to their existing customers and blog subscribers every time a new posting goes up. Others are less aggressive. But most agree that it's important to blog with links to keywords and phrases that anyone searching that particular industry would use.

"Your blog is going to rise in popularity with search engines," says Caroline Melberg, who runs a small marketing communications firm in suburban Minneapolis, who describes the process as "link love."

Whatever your time and budget, honesty remains the best policy, say business bloggers. Make your blog self-serving and your readers will lose interest in a heartbeat.

Says Shelley Symonds, chief marketing officer and regular blogger for Etelos Inc, a San Mateo, California-based developer of Web-based applications for business: "The trick is to balance the investment you make in time and money with the connection to your company - without being repellently self-promoting."