It is amazing to witness the growth of blogs among every type business and organization– from churches to rail yards, from yogurt and ice cream companies to retail stores, and from jewelers to a major cable company; all are using blogs in innovative ways to transform their businesses.

Blogging allows you to create constructive encounters with your customers – these experiences can completely change the way your customers view you and your business. The more you appreciate your customers, the more these positive experiences will occur, and the more successful your business will be. A happy customer sends other happy customers your way.

Like every major communication tool, blogs expand the ability for companies to operate and ultimately to create entirely new opportunities for growth, product development, and quality control. However, blogs take this communication a step further by bringing the best aspects of mass marketing and transforming them from one-way communication into a two-way dialogue.

Blogging is a communication tool, a marketing technique, a listening device, and a way to interact directly with customers one-to-one on a personal scale. Your business can benefit by using blogs to spread the word about what your company has to offer and to gain immediate feedback from customers.

The question for you, then, isn’t should you get into blogs, but how will you get into blogs and how will you leverage them to maximize their return to your business?

I am getting much of this material about blogs from a great book called Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright. I suggest everyone add this book to their marketing library.

No matter what you think of them, within the next 18 months, blogs will change your business.

Blogs are altering the world of business as we know it, redefining marketing, public relations, and customer communications, to name a few. If you aren’t embarrassing this change into your own marketing mix, if you haven’t started to use this marketing phenomenon, your competitors are, and I guarantee they’ll leave you in the dust wondering where your sales have gone and why your customers are deserting you in droves.

Blogs are not only here to stay, but they will have an effect on your business. The question is, will you use blogs to benefit your business, or will you ignore them and experience negative consequences that takes you completely by surprise?

If you are interested in the future of your company, you need to understand and start blogging.

Business Week, Fortune, Smart Company Wired, even People and Entertainment Weekly, are just a few of the magazines that are buzzing about a reinvention of web pages that are called weblogs, or blogs for short.

Believe it or not there are still people that think of blogs as online diaries or journals. The tide has turned as a small handful of forward-thinkers, leaders in the march to tomorrow, have recognized that blogs are having much more of a profound impact on the world of digital communications then we have ever seen.

If you don’t have a blog yet - stay tuned. I think in the next week I can convince you that must change.

I have a list with over 100 campaign uses of postcards. Just email me and request my “Postcard Use Checklist”. This means you could mail every day for almost four years and never have a duplicate subject about a card. Seriously, I am just trying to show you that you will never run out of ideas for postcards and subjects to create clever postcards. The possibilities are endless!