Blogging continues to grow in popularity as a medium for peer-to-peer communications, both personal and business. One of its attractions is that it is fairly easy to do. There are free services such as Blogger that allow you to put up a basic blog in just a few minutes. Even the more advanced paid services such as TypePad can get you up and running quickly, although you can spend hours “improving” on them as you go. As long as you have something to say on a fairly regular basis, you too can join the blogosphere.

The real challenge seems to be getting others to read your pearls of wisdom. After all, if you post diligently but no one comes to your blog, you’re really talking to yourself. And no one wants to get caught doing that.

So how do readers discover blogs? That’s the question Vizu Answers and Advertising Age asked in a March, 2007 poll of regular blog readers. Their response? Overwhelmingly, the answer was a link posted from other blogs. In fact, at 67.3 percent that answer was nearly triple the next-highest method, which is recommendations from others (22.9 percent).

When asked why they read blogs, these same respondents listed entertainment (65.7 percent) and personal interest/hobbies (42.5 percent) as the primary reasons. Only 12.3 percent said they read blogs for work/business use, which means it’s still pretty early in the game for business marketing.

If you’re serious about using a blog as a business marketing tool, your best bet is to go out and become part of the conversation on other sites. Just don’t be surprised if it takes a while to build an audience.