When I’m not at home staring at the internet, I love nothing more than climbing onto stage to speak about the many benefits of blogging.

Blogging engages your customers, allowing you to gather useful insights and market research. It also improves SEO, benefits customer relations and allows you a base from which to engage with other social media.If you’re running an eCommerce site, you need a blog.

So when Shaa Wasmund asked me to pop into her Sharing the Secrets of Social Media conference at the Sheraton Park Lane on Friday, I was only too happy to oblige!

Katie Lee talks blogging with Shaa Wasmund

It was a great day, with plenty of inspiring case studies from people who’ve experienced the benefits of social media first hand.

You can track some of the conversations over on Twitter via the SM4B hashtag.

If you need any further evidence that blogging should be a central part of your social media strategy, a handy new research report has shown just that.

A survey of 450 CEOs revealed that 85 percent of  respondents feel original content is critical to the success of their social media campaign.

If you’re trying to drive traffic to your site, a blog is not only excellent at natural SEO, it’s also a great way to bring in a new audience via both search and social bookmarking — not to mention traffic from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Blogging for SEO

If you’re just writing about the latest new products your company offers, you’re unlikely to see a huge increase in traffic or sales, but by producing something that is worth reading, you’re adding valuable content to your site that can be shared amongst online communities.

For more great ideas on how you can add valuable rich media to your site to increase traffic and sales, check out the case studies in the Miramus “Why Your Business Needs a Blog” presentation [4:28, needs audio]

Read full report on HubSpot [via Gold Coast Social Media]

Recommended Reading: Blogging for SEO. Improve your Google ranking with good content.

Well, blogging on Miramus didn’t last too long and, after Shaa told me off for having such a pitiful personal site, I finally cracked and spent an entire Sunday asking Al how to do things with a fancy WordPress template.

So now, if you’re looking for my personal blog, it’s over on Katielee.co.uk, where you can also find out about various little projects I’m working on. I’ll save the big news for the Miramus blog – though we seem to be working on an awful lot of  TOP SECRET projects at the moment, which makes it quite hard to talk about new things.

Having the cricket on in the background is one of the myriad benefits of working from home. But it’s not so great for Al, who works in the room next door. The room without the TV in.

Initially, he resolved this issue by using the Sky Player to stream the Ashes onto his Mac, but it kept buffering at vital moments, and we both got fed up with him stealing all the internet: BT Home Hubs aren’t designed for two web heads on wireless connections.

Instead, he bowed to the inevitable and took the retrograde step of tuning into the radio to listen to the cricket commentary like normal, Skyless people.

This has led to an interesting phenomenon, which I’ve noticed many times over the years and usually moaned about. However, in this case, it’s actually been quite handy.

It turns out, when you watch Sky HD, you are watching everything in the past thanks to the time lag. You’ll have noticed it when you switch from low-def to high def, but the time difference is even more pronounced if you’re listening to the radio.

Back in the World Cup, this time difference took the edge off penalty shoot outs because we could hear the neighbours down the road cheering or groaning a few seconds before we saw the player take the shot. We ended up enduring the stifling heat and watching with the windows shut.

But this time all it means is every time there’s a wicket Al comes running in to watch it and I look up from my monitor to catch the moment “live” for myself. It’s proved a very useful time lag and means that I’ve enjoyed the best bits of the cricket without having to watch the dreary afternoon slouch towards a draw.

So while I’m enjoying the edited highlights of the Ashes, Al’s getting a regular break from his screen with those room-to-room jogs.

The thought of moving the site I currently use as an online portfolio for PRs or print editors to look at if they need find out more about me over to WordPress is too hideous to contemplate right now. So, instead I’m squatting on the Miramus blog to see if I can make myself a home here. If it gets inappropriate, I’ll make like the Littlest Hobo and move on.

I’m quite rubbish at writing a personal blog. I love my crochet blog (due to be updated with the shocking news that recently I have dabbled in KNITTING) but an actual personal blog about what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been thinking has always proved problematic. I’m just not very good at sharing personal information about my latest brain blahs.

Good news for you, at least. I’m not planning on turning this into a blog that liberally sprinkles around words like “musings”, “ramblings”, “random” or similar (though I read and admire many that do). Instead, I’ll pop up the odd column that I can’t post on the Telegraph any more and try to keep it fairly free from angst.

But, who knows? Maybe I’ll get a taste for over-sharing and you’ll all come back in a month to discover that I’m posting up song lyrics, making liberal use of ellipses and tagging people with memes.