Blogging for Blogs: How to Use Blog Ads to Maximize Website Traffic
Written by Justin Michie
The Blog is taking the online world by storm, and is quickly becoming an internet fad, as more and more people start the own blog everyday on free sites like blogger.com.
A blog is simply an online diary or journal where people communicate their personal thoughts, along with web links, and/or other interesting information on an ongoing basis. A blog is essentially a mixture of what is happening in the blogger’s life, and what is happening on the web. There are really no set rules as to what defines a blog, but it is generally accepted to be some kind of personal thoughts combined with any other number of elements. Blogs are sometimes refereed to as “web logs,” however this can cause some confusion as “web log” can also refer to a web server’s log files.
Blogs are forums for voicing opinions and developing communities with common interests. It is human nature to communicate. Each new form of communication and revolutionized the way the world interacts. Right from the day of when the telegraph was invented to the day when internet was made public, the way people communicated has gone through a sea of change.
To smart marketers, blogs offer more than the communication of thoughts on the internet. Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular advertising medium and another source of revenue for marketers. There are two ways to market with blogs, the first is to use your own blog to build relationships, customer loyalty, branding, and subtly mention your products or services in them. The second way market with blogs is to place ads on or in other people’s blogs.
One of the reasons that blogs are popular with marketers is that they often rank high in search engines because the content is usually updated daily.
Blogging
Since blogs are personal, a company or business can’t technically have its own blog. However, the president, CEO, owner, or an employee can have their own personal blog. The business that the blogger works for can use the blog to advertise their products or services subtly throughout the blog, or less subtly as graphical or text ads through the blog page.
A blog is also an excellent way to popularize products and services. It serves an informal medium for getting across to potential customers, and if they validate your product or service. And blogs are an excellent tool for viral marketing, or free word of mouth publicity.
To ideally achieve the optimum search engine ranking, you should really update your blog 4-6 times a day. Since that’s often not possible, you can settle for a couple times a day, or use an RSS feed to add content.
Rich Site Summary, or RSS feeds allows you to post content on your blog automatically from any website with an RSS feed or vice versa. Types of content include could be news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums etc. You’ll need to ask your website designer to do this for you, as it does get a little technical.
Search engines look for change. If the search engine sees that you have new information, they will see that they need to visit your website more often, to keep its listings current.
Blog Ads
Blogs ads work because blogs serve as watering holes for like minded people. Blogger’s are vocal and influential, and people read them with passion, and tend to give them more influence in their lives then they should. Blog advertising is appropriate for new launches, new products, newsworthy material, and other things or relevant value.
Blog ads require different creative tactics than most of the rest of the internet. There are 3 ad options: They can be graphical in nature, solo text ads, or text ads intertwined into the actual text content of the blog. Like the blog itself, successful blog ads rely heavily on content. Humor and sarcasm tend to work well, as do ads with a timely newsworthy hook and/or some thought-provoking text.
Some of the best blog ads are placed right into the blog, so as appear to be part of the blog itself. These types of ads don’t actually appear to be ads to the casual reader, so they have some extra credibility that you couldn’t get from any ad, no matter how good it is.
Blog ads pricing is all over the place, but is usually priced by CPM, but can be priced by PPC, and rarely PPA. Prices usually go up from $5 CPM to $50 CPM, or range any where from $0.10 - $1 + if you go the PPC route.
Justin Michie is a well respected Internet Marketer and author of the brand new Internet Marketing book “Street Smart Internet Marketing” found at http://www.StreetSmartInternetMarketing.com. To download his FREE introductory ebook titled “99 Internet Marketing Tips – That You’ll Want to Know” go to http://www.99InternetMarketingTips.com. For more free articles or to sign up for Justin’s newsletter check out http://www.JustinMichie.com.
