For the small-budget marketing plan, blogging is a near-miracle. Costing little more than your time, you can leverage the extraordinary power of the Internet and search engines to communicate your message to the world - or at least your target market!

Consider this -- a few days ago, a physician in Hungary accessed my website and downloaded the "Crack the Code" report. How amazing is that! 

This event came about as a result of having a blog in which I attempt to add fresh relevant content, targeted to entrepreneurial physicians, at least three times a week.

Here's how a blog becomes so search-engine friendly:

• Every blog post generates a new web page, and search engines like to deliver rich deep relevant content to the searcher
• By knowing the key search terms people use to look for and find you, you can incorporate these terms into your blog post titles and the body of your content, and therefore be more easily found
• Being consistent in your posting encourages the search engine "bots" to visit and index your blog content (or blog/website such as mine) regularly - this can be almost immediately once you write frequently. What this means is that if you have a new product to offer, or content to promote, this will almost instantly be available to the search engines, unlike static websites whose content might be changed once every 3 to 6 months.

So how do you begin blogging?

First, let me reassure you that you do NOT need to be technologically proficient to handle a blog. If you can write an email, you can manage a blog!

Second, you can set up a blog at no cost. Good examples include WordPress (their basic package) and Blogger. Or a hosted blog for less than $5 a month such as TypePad.

And third, you can set up a blog in less than an hour.

Here is an excellent list of blogging resources to get you started.

Two books and resources I recommend to guide you are:

Blogwild: A guide for small business blogging
Build A Better Blog System (walks you through all the steps to set up a Typepad blog)

And finally, here are some examples of blogs being used to create community, generate a discussion and market healthcare services and products:

Kevin MD Medical Weblog
What's new in Plastic Surgery?
The Independent Urologist
Vegan Heart Doc

Of course, no matter what your business is, if you have a "voice", an opinion, 30-40 minutes to write 3 or 4 times a week, and valuable information to share with your target market, you are a natural blogger - and you will have a very powerful marketing and branding tool at your disposal!