Blogging can be really invaluable for small businesses. It's one of the best ways there is to build a relationship with your customers and potential customers. And it's free, which is always handy!

Blogging lets your customers get to know you. If we're not careful, the web can feel really impersonal, so blogging is wonderful because it lets people see there's a real person behind your business. It also gives you a chance to let your visitors know more about what you do, and to see your passion for it.

Every Phew! website comes with a blog. But if you don't want to blog, or if you're not quite ready to blog just now, that's no problem – we can set up your site without it. It's easy to turn it on later if you want.

The blog sidebar is different from the sidebar that appears on your pages. That allows you to use the two for different things – there are lots of sidebar options that are really useful on blog pages. For example, you can show:

• Recent posts
• Recent comments
• Blog categories
• Blog tags
• Archives of old posts

But of course you can also show any of the other options which I talked about on the sidebar page. People often post small ads in their blog sidebars – either for their own products and services, or for products they're affiliated with.

Social media sites such as  Twitter are one of the best ways for small businesses to build relationships with their potential customers. So I've created a 'Connections' widget especially for the Phew! website. It shows links to your accounts on places like Twitter and Facebook, with some cute little icons. You can see it at the top right.

You can use as many or as few of those 'Connections' as you like, so if you don't have, say, a Linked In account, then you don't need to show that option. The RSS option is easy, though – your blog has its own RSS feed automatically.