Editor's note: This is the twelfth in our popular weekly series of PowerBlog Reviews of other weblogs...


Blog for Business is a blog by Barbara Payne. Her blog's tagline is "Find your true voice...and grow your business."

And that's really what Blog for Business is all about: letting your true voice ring through in a business weblog.

You see, Barbara is a really good freelance writer. Really. I'm not exaggerating. That's her trade name and her domain name.

She says that a weblog can be used to grow your business, no matter what that business may be. To be successful at it, she says you have to "speak" in your true voice. By doing so, you let your unique skills and capabilities come out for clients, customers and business partners to hear.

Barbara herself has a special way of writing about business subjects and letting her personality come through. And since Barbara's forte is corporate communications, who better than she to show the rest of us to how to communicate in business?

Rather than talking about blogging per se, Barbara demonstrates how to use a blog to show off what you, the businessperson, can do with a blog.

One of the most valuable aspects of a business blog, Barbara says, is that it provides time for us to reflect:

"Blogs are places where we can stop and reflect. Filter out. Slow down. See a different side of an issue. Get the benefit of someone else's thinking, but in a personal way, not just as another place we have to absorb more information.

It's certainly not a new idea that reading enriches our lives. But blogs are a way we can incorporate reading without having to change what we're doing (sitting at the computer) and still enjoy some of the pleasure of conversation (most blogs allow comments if you have the time and the urge). And it's that personal touch that makes blogs different from all the other data we must take in."