Many say that this was the year of the business blog, or even two years ago was the year. But, from my view in the trenches – talking to small and mid sized business owners – business blogging has NOT arrived yet. There are still way too many CEOs, Marketing VPs and small business owners who are resistant to business blogging: Too much time; Don’t understand the value; Risk of revealing too much to competitors; Risk of that unhappy customer vocalizing. I think this is the year that business leaders will get over these crappy excuses. The economy will affect businesses in such a profound way (or CEOs will fear it so much) that they’ll be aggressively looking for ways to attract more traffic, capture more leads and make more sales via the web. Blogging is the first step to doing this cost effectively. A business blog will be as essential as a website in 2009.