The Keystone Cops are alive and well and living in the Thames Valley. A month since an incident in Henley on Thames, the police are now admitting they made a mistake. It appears that a branch of Lloyds TSB was being robbed at gunpoint. So four police cars and a helicopter rushed to the bank - except they went to Pangbourne, some 15 miles away. The bank's staff were somewhat surprised, but probably less surprised than the actual robber who got away with his action, seemingly uninterrupted by even a Community Support Officer.

So why did the police end up in the wrong place? It appears the alarm systems, which are rarely used, were inaccurate. The Lloyds TSB staff did exactly as they were trained and raised the "silent" alarm, warning the local police of the robbery in action. But the system suggested to the police the alarm was coming from a different location. You might have thought such systems were frequently tested, but the good news is that armed bank robberies are rare. Even though they are potentially serious, they have low awareness levels compared with street robberies, shoplifting and car crime. Your average police officer is unlikely ever to be involved in dealing with a bank raid in an entire career.

What this story reveals is that the things that remain at the forefront of our mind, are those to which we are exposed most often. For example, you probably spend most of the spring and summer caring for your garden's lawn, tending to it and making it look lush and green. But in the winter, you ignore it completely. The same, it appears is true with the Thames Valley Police - daily crime gets a lot of attention, but testing out those bank alarms which are almost never used anyway? They'll wait to another day - priorities.

Well, strange as it may seem, Google behaves in the same way as the Thames Valley Police. Google pays attention to the regular and frequent stuff that passes it by, only giving comparatively scant attention to the infrequent material. In fact, rather like the Thames Valley Police, if a website is changed infrequently, Google's algorithm pays even less attention, setting the delay for its next return at an ever more distant time in the future. It's like your lawn being in constant winter.

Google pays most attention to those blogs and websites which are updated most frequently. Search for "internet marketing blog" and you'll find that the top of the list is the HubSpot Blog, which is updated an average of five times a day. In the middle of the search engine results list is ClickNewz, which is written on a daily basis. Meanwhile, at the Number 10 slot is Mark Flavin's internet marketing blog, which is updated a couple of times a week. There is, it seems, a direct relationship between the position on a Google search results and the frequency of blogging. You can try searching for something else, such as "fashion blog". Top of the results is The Sartorialist, updated several times a day. Down at the bottom is Couture in the City, updated every few days. You can repeat this exercise at will and you will find that on average the top ranking websites and blogs are the ones which are updated more frequently than those further down the list.

In other words, Google perceives frequency of update as an important factor in the results it presents to us. That implies that the more often you post material to your blog, the higher up the search engine rankings you will go. In fact, several searches across multiple phrases reveal that the top ranking sites are those which are updated SEVERAL TIMES A DAY. Updating your blog once a week, or when the muse takes you, is no longer much of an option. Your competitors who add content more frequently will get more attention from Google and will be rewarded with higher positions in the search engine results ranking.

But it's not just Google that this is important to. Human beings react the same way. The more frequently you see a website mentioned, quoted or Tweeted, the more important you perceive it to be. Frequency of posting to your blog or adding content to your website is an essential component in this process. You get more people talking about you - online and offiline - the more frequently you add content.

And so it is true for the Thames Valley Police; the more frequently they see town centre knife crime, for instance, the more front of mind it becomes. And that's why its easy to ignore testing bank alarms to see if they are set right. Similarly, your lawn does need care in the winter if it is to look its best in the summer, but because it is not front of mind you ignore it and then have to work much harder in the summer to make it look anywhere near decent. Don't let your website or blog become your forgotten lawn - add content to your website multiple times each day. You'll get higher search engine ranking and you'll get more people talking about you. Only add content once a week or so and you will become one of the forgotten many.

Silence covered the room as the question was asked, but slowly one man at the back raised his hand to answer. "Ah good," I said, "someone here has been blogging in their business. Tell us your story please." The middle-aged, balding chap rose to his feet and stumbled out just one sentence: "I tried it once but it didn't work."

There I was, speaking at a business event on the power of blogging and the way that it can help companies attract online attention, even money. Only one person in this 50 strong audience had even attempted blogging and from his answer he was expecting it to have an overnight success. Oh dear.

Business Week magazine has proclaimed that "blogging is not a business elective, but a prerequisite". In other words, if you want to be in business much longer you need to have a blog. Many companies still think of a blog as some kind of diary, where you post company events like product launches and new services, as they happen, once in a while. But people who "get" blogging realise that it can fundamentally shift a business once a blog becomes central to that firm.

Here's what you can do with one blog post. You can bring attention to that post, automatically, on:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Yahoo!
• Plurk
• Plaxo
• LinkedIn

You can re-blog it, automatically on things like:

• Blogger
• Vox
• WordPress
• Tumblr

You can automatically bookmark it on:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Posterous
• ...and more...

In other words, with just one blog article you can get massive coverage for your business throughout the web. Without blogging, you have to get all this coverage manually. So, if a blog is central to your business, you increase your visibility significantly - and gain more website traffic as a result.

However, all this is old news. This is the kind of thing that the hapless businessman should have been doing when I asked that question about who was blogging; I asked that question two years ago. Clearly, much of business is so far behind what is happening online, they are getting left behind. A blog, as Business Week magazine said, should be central to your business. But they said that almost five years ago, in May 2005.

Now, blogging is not enough. You need to do all the things with a blog listed above - you can do it easily with Ping - but you need to do more. You need to think about blogs from a localisation perspective. With geotagging and mobile use now becoming increasingly popular, your blog needs to be locally relevant. It needs to be dynamically changed according to the location of the reader. And even if you are not doing that yet - I admit I'm not - we all need to plan how we are going to do that, because come this time next year it will be the norm.

Video consumption online has hit record viewing figures, contributing to the billions of hours of video now being watched online. How much of your blog is video based? And that's to say nothing of the exponential rise in podcast downloads via iTunes and other audio providers.

Some businesses are still in the "thinking about" stage of adding a blog. They need to get real. Not only has blogging moved on, companies who made it central to their business have also changed the rules. Bblogging is central to many successful online businesses, it's now also the focus for them of a multimedia content production system. Blogging without localisation, video, audio and a host of other enhancements is so "old hat"; yet, sadly, most businesses are still in the pre-blogging phase (i.e. still stuck in the last 1990s).

If you are still thinking about a blog, it's time to wake up and realise that the train left the station several hours ago.

Business blogs depend on an army of people who are tapping away into their keyboards each day in the hope that someone will read their ramblings; much of what is typed is ignored and never gets read beyond a mere handful of loyal fans. Yet these hapless bloggers carry on typing away because they have been sold on the benefits of blogging and the need to add content to their website for "search engine optimisation", or because their bosses demand "five a day" in terms of posting. Meanwhile, even if we do stumble upon their websites, we just click away, move on, disregard their musings.

Not so for the world's leading mobile phone companies. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona they have announced a bold move in order to fight against the growing influence of the Apple iPhone. Twenty-four of the biggest mobile phone companies have joined together in a cooperative venture to develop "Apps" for every make and style of phone that's not an iPhone. Analysts, of course, will debate whether or not the cooperation will work and Apple fans will obviously say that nothing can beat the iPhone, no matter what this new venture achieves. But whichever way you look at it, the mobile phone companies have made an impact.

Indeed, the news world has gone rather crazy - within an hour of the announcement, Google was showing that over 1,200 news outlets had covered the story in one way or another. In other words, the announcement clearly had impact. In fact, the mobile world is rather good at that - the iPhone itself, the launch of Google Android phones, the first mobile phones with Skype - and so on. Frequently, the mobile industry presents us with stuff that has an impact.

Now compare that with the typical business blog. How much impact do they make? In fact, you could say that almost all business blogs are "low impact". For instance, how often are you interested in the changes to their office layout, or the fact that they have just had some new equipment installed? Or what about staff changes - do they have an impact on you? Probably, you couldn't care less about these things.

Many business blogs - perhaps most of the them - are "low impact"; they present us with trivia, simply because they are searching for something to write. Like the mobile phone industry, the best business blogs are those which have an impact. If your blog is full of low level stuff, trivia or minor internal happenings, your impact is going to be rather low.

So, rather than feel pressured to write something every day, or to fulfil some kind of target for blogging, only write things when they will have an impact. The problem is that like the mobile phone industry, you might only have something to say once a year and you need a huge forum, like the Mobile World Congress to be heard. Occasional impact has to be significant; the chances are that in your business, the level of significance of the impact you could make is less than Google introducing a new laptop, for instance.

What can you do about this dilemma? You clearly need to make an impact if you aren't to be viewed as trivial, or ignored altogether; yet what you can blog about is not that impactful. Here are some suggestions for things that you can write about that will inevitably have an impact on your audience:

• Write about them Write about your audience, talk about them - not you - and you will connect with them and have an effect. The Sartorialist is a popular blog on fashion design that does just that by being full of photos of real people wearing "real clothes", rather than skinny models wearing goodness knows what...!
• Include practical ideas Blog about things your audience can do, actions they can take that will directly affect them and help them in their life or business. Chris Garrett's blog on the business of blogging does exactly that by providing ideas and material you can use and put into practice.
• Give the inside track Provide information that is of real interest to your audience, but which they can't easily get hold of. The Formula One blog, F1 Fanatic is a good example of this kind of material, giving motor racing fans the information they want, but can't easily or quickly get for themselves.
• Talk about people If your blog provides all the gossip in your industry, you will get readers because gossip has impact, like it or not. We are fascinated by the "goings on" of other people which is why blogs like Heckler Spray do so well.
• Provide resources When your blog has useful lists, white papers, downloads or links to relevant software and services, your blog will make an impact. The highly successful Mashable does this with hundreds of blog posts full of useful links and resources for the world of social media.
• Be controversial Don't say the same as everyone else on a topic. Be different. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog is a great example of someone who is prepared to stand up to an established community and say something different.
• Entertain Say something funny; amuse people or make them cry, even titillate them. In other words, induce an emotional response. The wacky Blame it on the Voices blog will usually raise a smile in its faithful audience.

These are just a few of the ways you can make an impact. If you have nothing to say, keep quiet; don't blog because you feel you ought to or because you "have to". However, your blog will only be read if it has an impact and if you can't make the same level impact as the mobile phone industry has done today, then you could use the ideas above to trigger some blog posts that will get you noticed.

Political bloggers are a happy bunch of people. At long last the internet gives them a means of venting their spleen. Beforehand, they could only moan to their mates down the pub. Now, thanks to blogging software, they can get their ideas to a wider audience. Some, like Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale's Diary and Business & Politics have become widely read and influential. Others are just the rants of the disaffected.

New research has discovered what happens to political bloggers though. The study from the University of Wisconsin shows that political bloggers initially start their online writings because they have "something to say" and a passion to get off their chest their political viewpoint. Importantly, though, that all changes once they get a readership.

The research shows that the motivation for political bloggers is altered by the presence of an audience. The bloggers who get an audience begin to feel the impact they are making in terms of how that audience reacts. The result is that the bloggers start writing for the audience instead of writing for themselves. And once they do that, it seems, they get a bigger audience, providing a positive feedback loop that encourages them to blog even more.

This study has important implications for business. Most business bloggers give up in less than a month. They start a blog, write a few posts and then simply fade away. They have said what they have come to say, they've got off their chest their important stuff and then the motivation simply dries up. What the study on political bloggers shows is that your motivation will change once you get an audience. Suddenly you want to write for them, rather than just write for your business - or because some SEO expert or blogging consultant has told you that writing a blog is a good idea.

Take a look at the world's most successful blogs; all of them are "old". They are well established, have lasted for several years and keep going, day in, day out. Many of these blogs are businesses in their own right. According to Technorati's State of the Blogosphere almost one in five successful bloggers now describe themselves as "professional" bloggers - earning their income from blogging. And when you look at these people, such as ProBlogger or MarketingPilgrim you can see that what they do is write for their audience, not themselves.

The Wisconsin study of political bloggers reveals why that works. It shows that it changes your motivation. Once you write for an audience you want to continue writing for them. When you are writing for yourself, you give up.

So, if you start a blog and make sure you get an audience - do whatever it takes - you will find that your desire to write will increase. You will be more motivated to continue with your blog, you will become more audience or reader focused and you will be spurred on to do even more blogging. But importantly you will no longer be writing about your business, you will be providing material that is for your audience. That will then raise you up the ladder of business blogs, perhaps even getting into that Top 100 league table.

Getting an audience for your business blog will clearly change the way you think and will alter your motivation. You will become much more reader-centric and much less self-obsessed. And as anyone who knows anything about business will tell you, that's fundamental. So to achieve that, persevering with blogging is a good start because it will alter your thinking - once you get your audience.

Teenagers are losing interest in blogging, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Media coverage of the report - released yesterday - suggests that teens are more interested in short items, such as texting, status updates and so on. However, like much of the discussion about blogging we are not necessarily being told the truth. There are some inconsistencies, which are not immediately obvious.

For instance, the report reveals that teenagers are not using Twitter very much; so how does that square with the supposed interest in short messages? If teens were mainly interested in writing short messages they would swarm to Twitter - and they haven't.

Furthermore, the study shows that the proportion of teenagers who blog has fallen in two years from 24% to 15%. At the same time, say the researchers, the over 30s blog more, with an increase in the numbers of bloggers from 7% to 11%. But take a look at the details of the study and you will see there is a margin of error of almost 4% in the statistics. That means the teens level of blogging could have stayed roughly the same, from 20% to 19% while the adult level of blogging could have gone down from 11% to 7%. In other words, far from teens giving up blogs, it may be the older generation.

As ever, headline statistics never tell us what is really going on. Indeed, many people may well say they don't blog; yet they write "notes" on Facebook (the same thing) or they post "messages" in Ecademy (the same thing) or they write "stuff" on MySpace (the same thing). To many people "blogging" may imply setting up their own blog as part of their own website, or over at Blogger or WordPress. The question you ask people has an impact on the results you get as well. Furthermore, the Pew study was based on familial data; it was interviews with parents and their teenage children. So, if your Dad is a blogger is that going to be a cool thing for you to do? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The relationship that exists between the participants in the study could also have an influence on the results.

The Pew researchers are careful to make clear the limitations of their study and provide full details of what they did and how they obtained their results. There is statistical information as you would expect with any professional research. The problem is, the results suggest that blogging is on its way out with younger generations. And that then could put off people from blogging in the first place.

Consider growing up in the Middle Ages. If you could write, you would have written on dried animal skins or on parchment perhaps. Then, when paper was introduced into Britain some people would have moved from writing on skin to using paper. If we'd done a study at the time we may well have said that writing on animal skins was getting less popular. But what we wouldn't have seen so easily was that writing itself was becoming more popular because more people were using paper. Today, we look at studies which show that blogging is losing its popularity; but what we fail to notice is that writing online is more popular than ever before because people are no longer "blogging" but "Facebooking". Teens may be "blogging" less (they may not) but they are certainly writing more than their parents' generation did when they were teenagers. Online content production is at an all time high; don't let anyone lead you into thinking that it is becoming less popular.