If you haven't set up a blog already - do it today. You'll need to become an active blogger for several reasons. Yes, it's true, blogging can be a waste of time. It can drain your profits and act against your business by taking time away from cash generation. Indeed, it can take your mind off what you should be doing and divert you into pointless activity.

But here's another take on it. Consider how blogging can become a profit making activity in its own right. If you treat blogging as a separate profit centre within your business, it can be extremely valuable to you. Here's how.

For a start, blogging can increase your profile and "presence" on the Internet. You'll increase your search engine visibility, raise your ranking and gain more hits. That can create more business. But you need to know whether it actually does this, rather than thinking it does. That's why you need to track click throughs from your blog right through to sales. The best way I've found of doing this is to use my shopping cart's ad tracker feature. This allows me to track any clicks in any page I produce and see if an when that person buys from me. It's a valuable way of seeing how profitable each blog entry becomes. It helps focus your mind and help you know what to write about and what to avoid within your blog.

So, true enough, used in this way blogs can help your business generally. However, many people only think it does this - they don't know because they don't measure blogging effectiveness. As in most things in business, only testing and measurement will reveal the truth to you.

But generating business for your existing products and services is not the only benefit of blogging. Blogs can raise cash on their own. For instance you can carry advertising, you can sell affiliate products such as those from Clickbank or books from Amazon.

For most people blogging is a waste of time and money because they use blogs to write their thoughts and just to add some content to their sites because they've been told it's a good idea. For the vast majority of bloggers I have spoken with recently, blogging has been a tremendous cost to their business.

However, used properly, with planning and with testing. blogging can make you additional revenue. So, don't hang up that keyboard just yet. Start your business blog as soon as you can.

Graham Jones is a professional speaker and psychologist. He has specialised in the psychology of communications and has a particular interest in how we use the Internet. He speaks about the need for businesses to think differently about the Internet. When he is not speaking about the psychology of the Internet, Graham is helping people overcome their fear of public speaking.