As a small business owner, time is always of the essence.

Whether you are looking to make more sales, deal with customer service issues, or promote your company, there never seems to be enough hours in the day to get it all done.

So, what if you have a small business blog, but you are not quite sure how to go about promoting it? Are you wasting your time, or is there traction to be gained from it?

As it turns out, you can promote your company blog daily in just a short period of time.

* Providing relevant and fresh copy to the site several times a week

* Including relevant keywords tied to your business that will allow search engines to send traffic your way

* Using social media to network your blog so that it garners more attention

Unfortunately, too many small business owners either do not see the need to promote their blog or do not invest such time, meaning they are missing out on a golden opportunity to drive traffic (and customers) their way.

In order to avoid missing out on traffic, there are different tools available for blog owners to utilize, one of which is Posterous.

For those not familiar, Posterous is a convenient tool that allows the blog owner to post content directly to their blog through email, selecting where to place the content based on the return address of the email. With Posterous, blog owners can send images, audio files, links, documents, and videos. They can even send both at the same time, as the site will figure it out and post it for you.

It is important to remember that Posterous makes social media easy by enabling the blog owner to control the posting process from their inbox – no apps are necessary.

With Posterous or another tool in mind, also take into account the importance of search engine optimization(SEO) as it relates to your company blog.

For the company owner that is not up to speed on SEO, getting traffic to your site from major search engines such as Google is key. With this type of traffic, you bring countless eyes and potential customers to your online door each and every day.

One of the better platforms for blog owners to put in play is WordPress, a blogging platform that has a number of SEO options for users, along with the fact that it is quite simple to understand.

An important aspect of properly using WordPress is creating the proper tags (keywords) when making posts, thereby allowing Google to locate them when indexing pages for your blog and company site. Always remember that your keywords should be relevant to the post and not just a case of keyword stuffing. If you do the latter, there is a good chance Google will punish your site in ranking it lower due to spamming.

You should also utilize a sitemap so that Google can locate all of your site’s pages, providing you with more attention.

For even the novice blogger, WordPress can work wonders for your site, giving you the ability to be found by consumers who then may very likely end up being customers.

Ask any blogger who posts often and they are likely to tell you that their traffic numbers are good to great. At the same time, ask the blogger who posts infrequently, and they will likely tell you that their traffic is minimal at best. The simple fact is Google and other search engines want to see frequency with posts in order to elevate you to a higher ranking.

Relevancy also plays a key role here in gaining a better search engine ranking.

If your small business revolves around life insurance, posting about cars and hardware makes little to no sense. On the other hand, posting about how to get life insurance, the importance of life insurance, what life insurance premiums typically cost, and who needs life insurance all go a long way in positioning you as an authority in your respective field.

If you are still not in tune with the importance of driving traffic via your blog posts, consider the fact that link building is a great way to network yourself on the Web.

Link building involves getting different websites to link to your site, in essence promoting it. While you may be quite sure that the products and/or services you talk about on the Web are good, having countless others do that as well brings you added attention and credibility.

The two forms of link building are internal and outbound.

With internal link building, you witness the construction of a linking system around your site’s pages, meaning search engines can crawl all the different pages on your website.

With outbound or external linking, a back link from another website means a vote for your site, giving you added credibility with search engines.

One of the productive ways to go about link building is being involved on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Find similar individuals on these sites and propose swapping links with them. As you do this, more people become familiar with your site, meaning increased exposure.

Lastly, blog directories are an option in order to gain added attention for your brand.

In order to do this, go online and look for websites that curate posts visible on blogs.  After you have found some of these types of sites, simply fill out the required details and submit your post. Typically after editorial review, your blog will appear in the directory within a few days.

One important item to point out is that your blog posts should be relevant to the directory you are pitching. Therefore, if your business does not offer products for women, pitching your site to a number of female-focused blogs does not make a lot of sense.

Also, keep in mind that many blog directories will request you to add a banner or link from their site to your homepage. If you do so, you could see your search engine ranking negatively impacted.

At the end of the day, promoting your business blog opens up a number of opportunities for you to grow your company.

If you have something to say, blog it.

This guest post was written by Dave Thomas, who has 23 years of experience as a writer, and has covered a wide array of topics from background checks to utilizing social media in your business.