The Wall Street Journal published an article a few days ago about the pros and cons of blogging for small businesses. The pluses can be counted in new clients, new business and an increased profile in one’s professional community. The downside is most definitely the time-consuming writing that regular blogging takes.

I’ve found that there are blogs out there by consultants and strategists who are paid to attend conferences, write books, and blog about a given topic day in and day out. It is what they do for a full time living, much like print journalists must write their stories or TV journalists must produce their reports. Their business is, in a lot of ways, their blog.

For those of us who have more of a business than a blog, blogging multiple times a day to keep up with the pros is an impossible goal. Focusing on a more realistic goal — one post a day — is a fair target for busy professionals engaged in client service and workload management. While visitors to your site want to see new, fresh content, they also don’t want to see meaningless posts. They want to see that you are proactive, knowledgeable, and able to help them face their challenges.

For political candidates, my advice would be the same. Your campaign blog is an important tool to communicate with your target audiences and should be updated accordingly with news, pictures and links pertaining to your candidacy. But it should not be the centerpiece of your communications strategy. Blogs (and associated tools such as podcasts, vidcasts and microblogs) are tools to be used as part of an overall outreach strategy and resources should be allocated to them as such.

Is blogging worth it? If you have something to contribute to the marketplace of ideas, then you have something to contribute to the blogosphere. It’s just a matter of taking the time to share your perspective with a world of potential clients.