One of the great ways you can use the blog system is for your newsletter.  If you're writing a newsletter, you're already in the habit of communicating regularly with your clientele.  You can convert that discipline into blogging.

You can write a blog posting more regularly than you might put an entire newsletter together, enabling you to be in contact with your readers on a more regular basis.

Another benefit of using the blog for your newsletter is the Tag List.  If you're not familiar with tags - I think they're one of the most powerful features of the blog system.

You have the option to add tags at the end of each post.  You'll see all of my tags to the left of the blog.

Let's say you've developed an interest in Search Engine Optimization.  If you click on that tag in the Tag List you'll see all of my posts with that tag.

It's easy to see how useful this feature can be.

Let's say you're a table grape grower in Fresno County and you receive Steve Vasquez's newsletter.  And let's say that Steve has a blog version of his newsletter that is tagged.  Imagine you've got a mealybug infestation (not so hard to imagine).  If Steve has tagged all of his posts about mealybugs, one click will display the entire archive of his newsletters that discuss mealybugs.

You can still e-mail a newsletter to your clients, but archive the contents in a blog.

But what if you haven't been blogging all along and you want this feature.  It's really easy to convert your newsletter archive to a blog.

Many people have their newsletters archived in PDF format on their Web sites.  Simply copy and paste the content of your newsletter from the PDF into a blog posting.  One post for each issue.  Add the relevant tags.  And here's a little known feature of the blog system - you can change the date of your post.

Your post will have the date it was entered by default.  Go into the Administration section and click on Moderate Posts.

You'll get a list of all of your posts. Click on the date of the post you want to change:

Change the date and save.

Easy!