Blogging is a major marketing tool today. And, as with all commercial ventures, your appearance helps determine whether or not potential customers will vest time, interest and money in you. Most websites nowadays have blogs hidden away on them, and these don't really get much notice. This is because they're start-from-scratch blogs, which require massive amounts of time to build a fanbase. What you want, is something easy to use, like Blogger, combined with a personalized blog design that's all about you.

What a blog can do for you.

• A blog with a voice can get you loads of visitors you wouldn't otherwise have. You could be getting traffic from all over the place, and a percentage of them will take an interest in what you're offering.

• It can sell your product. I sell a lot of books this way, just from people seeing my novel covers posted. They click on them out of curiosity and then a portion of those people buy my books. These are people I wouldn't otherwise encounter.

• It can help build you a webpresence. My blog gets all kinds of crazy inbound links for certain topics, which means it gets mentioned in all kinds of circles. This doesn't happen overnight, but if you persist you will experience the same thing.

• It can lead to other work. If you demonstrate a particular voice on your blog, you may get writing offers from other places, such as magazines and publishers in general.

Avoid the web designers and professional graphic artists.

• There are plenty of designers like me and my Blogbunnie Design Studio who charge reasonable prices. You don't need someone who has a degree in computer science or graphic design to make your blog for you.

• "Professionals" charge professional prices, and I've seen that offered at 1500 bucks for just a blog. It's a blog, for God's sake, not a Fortune 500 Website.

• Private blog designers are usually doing it for fun, because they enjoy creating. This means they are less likely to treat you more like a person and less like a number.

• You don't NEED all that web design crap to have an awesome blog. You're just after something that looks nice -- the rest of it doesn't mean crap to you, so who cares about all their special CSS and XML etc skills? These aren't really needed to make a blog layout and install it on blogger. Well, ok, a bit, but not enough to warrant charging you several hundred bucks.

Use Blogger, or something similar.

• It comes with a buiit-in community, which means you get instant advertising for free.

• You can post anywhere you choose, which means you get instant advertising for free.

• Anyone can figure out how to use it.

A little effort goes a long way.

Unless you already have a fanbase, or already have a community to join, it can take a few months to really start seeing your sitemeter go up in numbers. But rest assured, if you keep your blog updated and make a point of visiting other blogs and leaving comments, you are very likely to see good results in a reasonable period of time.