It’s tough to find a respected online news and information site these days that hasn’t incorporated blogs in some way, and there’s a good reason for that - they work.

As Online Community Editor at The Age, James Farmer (co-founder of Incsub) managed the development of an extensive network of bloggers for Fairfax Digital. Within six months, blogs accounted for over 3 million Page Impressions a month and over 20% of the sites non-frontpage traffic - all for less than you’d pay one senior journalist annually.

As a media organisation you can use blogs to:

• Take ownership of niche content areas for very little cost
• Provide spaces for discussion and reader interaction, without cumbersome bulletin board functionality
• Get existing writers engaging with online media, in ways you never thought were possible
• Simply incorporate video, podcasts, slideshows and all manner of multimedia into your reporting, feature and opinion pieces
• Solicit citizen media without having to rely on email

But you don’t have to stop there, consider providing blogs to your readership, in order to:

• Gain ownership of the online conversational space in you’re area or community
• Source often brilliant content from readers that you can reuse across the site
• Dramatically improve your search engine visibility and stats
• Provide soapboxes for far more sophisticated debate and discussion than comments will ever allow
• Gain revenue from premium upgrades, features and extra advertising opportunities
• Turn your readers into users, and then provide them with other services