In-the-know inbound marketers have come to accept business blogging as an integral part of their marketing strategy. But that doesn't mean they're actually blogging. At least not as much as they should.

Al Biedrzycki is an Inbound Marketing Consultant on the VAR team at HubSpot. He works with HubSpot's partner agencies to help them achieve success through their Inbound Marketing efforts. He enjoys teaching his clients the best practices of Inbound Marketing and is thrilled when they succeed.

Blog idea droughts are the worst.

Any marketer who creates content has almost certainly experienced one. Sometimes, inspiration comes naturally and the blog content practically writes itself—other times, an idea drought rears its ugly head. This is bad news because blogging for the sake of blogging doesn’t always inspire useful content. A lack of useful content is problematic also because the reason for creating it is the foundation for any marketer’s blogging strategy. If the foundation collapses, you’ll be hard pressed to see results. So how do you survive an idea drought?

As chief operating officer and head blogger at New York Parking Ticket, I wanted to jumpstart the traffic to our fledging website. So I followed the Hubspot blogging blueprint religiously, then started to measure the results.

Get more out of your blog by recruiting other people in your organization to help create content and articles for your business blog.

Peter is the Marketing Director for United Home Experts and Everlast Composite Siding.  Over the past 3 years Peter's company has used HubSpot tools with two websites to develop a strong online presence, generate thousands of new leads, obtain hundreds of new customers, and acquire millions of dollars in revenue. Introduce yourself to Peter Martino on Twitter @pmmartino.

One of the biggest benefits of blogging is that it helps you attract quality inbound links to your site. The best way to attract those links is to create content that your general audience will find useful and interesting.

Proper formatting is one of the most regularly overlooked best practices of content creation, but it is a major reason for the success and for the failure of a piece of content. 

Your most successful blog posts are successful for a reason. Whether it was the insightful domain knowledge, the helpful tips you gave away for free, your ability to talk in the consumer’s language or a combination of all three - your blog post earned the trust and deserved the visibility of your prospective customers.

This article is a guest blog post from David Michaelangelo Silva is Sales & Marketing Coordinator for Blue Link, an inventory management & accounting ERP software provider and an active HubSpot customer.

As Mark Kilens and Brian Whalley discussed during the August 5^th Content Camp, How to Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines, guest blogging is a great way to build inbound links. Specifically inbound links tied to the anchor text of specific keywords you are trying to improve your SEO ranking for. Increasing the number of inbound links should be an important part of your SEO strategy as the search engines rely heavily on inbound links to understand which websites have the most relevancy for specific keywords.