Why it pays to Blogvertise, Blog Marketing

Blogvertising is a venue, still in its infancy, but it's going to be huge. Internet blogs offer insights, opinions, information and entertainment of a variety, accessibility and quantity unparalleled by any other medium. To understand it's potential value to an advertiser, you should know a few things about the dynamics of blogging.

Many people post blogs, just for fun or for their own benefit. Writing is a great way to organize your thoughts, even if only for yourself. In the process of doing so you also learn more about the topics your interested in as you research the topic of the day. Blogs are unique in that this post for example, will still be here tomorrow, next week, five years from now.

Many blogs develop big readership, either through promotion or word of mouth due to great content. But an advertiser can take advantage of the industry as a whole, even those that don't get frequent visits.

When you advertise on a blog, the most cost-effective way to go is through a mention and a link within the blog. Essentially you pay the blogger to write about you, your product and/or your company. This can be done through services like CrispAds or PayPerPost, often for as little as $5 per blogger. Of course you get to approve any post you're paying for. This accomplishes several things. First, there's the obvious. Readers of that particular blog are informed of your product and provided a link. That link, remember is there for as long as the blog exists. It may be there for years, or even decades. An added benefit is that the more links you have to your site across the web, the higher you rank on search engines, regardless of the readership of the particular page its on.

Here's where it gets really interesting. Many bloggers will attempt to maximize traffic by selecting topics based on currently popular search terms. These term rankings are updated every hour or so. Suppose you put out an offer to pay $25 per post for bloggers to discuss your company: Easy Street Designs. $25 is not huge, but it's enough to get the attention of a lot of bloggers. Most of the interested parties are going to do a search for your company to get more information for their post. If enough of them do so around the same time (shortly after you post your offer, say Monday morning), your company is going to show up in the top 100 search terms for that hour. This can result in a whole slew of unsolicited blog posts about your company by other bloggers chasing trends. In the end you may pay for a dozen posts and actually get several hundred. The downside is that you have no editorial control over the unsolicited posts. Oh well. What do want for nothing?