If you have a business website, you’ve probably heard the mantras — content is king; content, content, content. Content is what makes people go to your site, stay on your site and respond to your site. FRESH content keeps that customer response repeating itself — it attracts new visitors, retains existing visitors and grows your business presence.

One of the easiest ways to keep content fresh is to include and regularly maintain a blog on your website. “Blog” and “content” are not interchangeable — in fact, a blog IS content.

Business blogs help you share your expertise, communicate and connect with customers, and increase your presence through web traffic.

Blogs also make your company approachable. As About.com Guide Jennifer Kyrnin phrases it, “By putting a face and a name behind your products on your blog, you give your customers someone to identify with rather than a faceless corporation.”

Not sure where to get started? Try including these in your blog:

No matter what type of blog posts you decide to write, just make sure you are publishing new posts frequently. At minimum a blog should include one new post per week. Learn more about the best times to post a blog in our post, Best Times to Post to Social Media.

In business, as in all aspects of life, it’s important to look at the decisions you’ve made and things you’re doing to determine if results could be maximized with a fresh perspective. Facebook, with its constantly evolving interface, is a great place to monitor your social media interactions with customers and regularly look for areas of improvement.

As you continue to update and grow your business’ social media presence, there are some very simple lessons that you can apply every step of the way. In fact, I regularly apply these to my own Facebook page for my yoga business.

To make the best use of social media, you need to build a community, enlist audience participation, and cause your fans to share your message with their networks.

As with all areas of business, social media takes time to get going and maintain.  But is well worth it in the end.

As the site editor for GlobalWrites.com, I recently had the privilege of working with our newest GlobalWriter Dave Schafer on his series about the importance of high-quality internal communications. I was so impressed at the impeccable quality of his work, and so intrigued by his background as a journalist, I got to wondering, What makes this guy tick?

Luckily, Dave indulged me by answering a few questions. I’m no hard-hitting journalist, but I think I dug up some good dirt here…

Dave, please tell us a bit about who you are.

I’m a very un-complex guy. I moved to Houston “for just a few years” 10 years ago. And I’ll be here for a long while. I’m married with two daughters — 8 and 6. And now I get to put them on the bus in the morning and take them off in the afternoon, which is awesome. I like sci fi and fantasy novels, and I tend to read more for entertainment than self-improvement. I love a good story, whether it’s in a book, on the television or on the big screen. I love good beer and good wine and good meat, and, apparently, writers named Stephen or Steven. (Some of my favorites writers: Steven Brust, Stephen Crane and Stephen King.) Oh, and I was (briefly) in a couple of punk bands in high school. I don’t play any instruments, and I can’t sing, so… um… yeah, I just sort of screamed the lyrics (that I wrote). When I start on a project, I tend to dig really deep into it and do it very thoroughly. As a writer, my first drafts are always way too long.

Why did you become a writer?  Tell us about your journey.

I always wanted to be a writer. I wrote (briefly) for the school newspaper, and I wrote some poorly constructed fiction short stories as a child. But then, I really stopped pursuing that. By the time I was 17, I was a bartender at a private country club. Hey, I had a future doing that. But, by the time I was 21 and working bar at a restaurant, I was very much over being a bartender. I realized that if I was going to have to work eight hours a day, I might as well do something I enjoyed. I still read a lot, but only wrote a very little bit. And I wanted to write for a living. So, I decided to go to college. I thought about majoring in English, but I didn’t know what kind of job prospects that offered, and creating the stories was always my weak spot. So, if I was a journalist, I’d always have something to write. Four years later, I graduated and got a job covering crime at a small newspaper in a rural Appalachian county in Ohio.

You have such a strong background writing for newspapers.  What made you make the jump from journalism to copywriting?

I wanted to eat. No, seriously, I actually got into copywriting to satisfy some of my feature-writing desires. While I’d worked for newspapers up to that point, my focus in college was on magazines, and I really wanted to get a little more into that realm. And I saw an opportunity to start writing these really good, short feature articles for the city of Houston. So, I took that job — which, it turns out, involved a lot of other copywriting tasks. And, I found that I really enjoyed constructing and writing those other forms. I also realized that there was a future in this, so I tried to learn a lot about it and took on as many different types of projects as I could. (I started writing magazine pieces on the side as a freelance writer — which I still do.)

Which have been some of your most meaningful projects?

Then there was the challenge, fun and satisfaction of building the communications plan for rolling out a new benefits plan for city employees. They weren’t happy about the changes, but they heard what we were saying, at least. Writing a script, digging deep to find humor that someone else would actually be willing to speak. (Most of my jokes are groan-inductors, and nobody would want to repeat them.) Article pieces that mean the most to me tend to be the stories that mean the most to my subjects. The stories I’ve written about veterans, for example. But I wrote a series of seven articles about the deplorable conditions and overcrowding at the local county jail when I was a beat reporter, and a series about the shockingly low literacy rates in the county. I also really enjoyed digging deep to look at libraries in the 21st century. And… well, I could sort of go on.

If you could interview anyone for an article, living or dead, who would it be and why?

Jesus — the man, not the ghost. Not because I’m religious (I’m not), but because some much of the world revolves around what people think he said and how people interpret what they think he said. It would be fascinating to interview him and ask him follow-up questions. Of course, he’d speak a completely different language, so there’s that issue…

We’re so excited to have you on board at GlobalWrites. But be honest.  How did JoAnn sucker you into joining our motley crew?

I actually reached out to JoAnn. I was lucky that an acquaintance mentioned that I should contact her. And, since I’m trying to build my project base, she offers the perfect avenue to do that. Not to mention her winning personality, humor, attractiveness, powerful aura, obvious leadership skills… (she’s going to be reading this, right?)

What are your dreams for the future?

Simply to build my business. I made the leap. I’m where I want to be. Now, I need to get enough business to keep it going for the long term. I want to make enough doing the freelance thing to stay constantly busy and make a comfortable living.

Thanks, Dave, for humoring me.  It was great getting to know you!