The Art of Blog Advertising
If you want to become an Internet marketer you will have to learn the art of blog advertising. No matter if you want to make money with adsense, make money using affiliate advertising or have some other monetization method in mind you will have to master basic blog marketing to accomplish it.
What Are They?
A blog is different from a standard static HTML website where the content does not usually change. It is usually maintained by a person or team of persons with daily, weekly or monthly regular entries (aka. “posts”). These entries can include descriptions of events, commentary, opinions, video, of graphics. The posts are displayed on the blog in reverse chronological order with the latest one written appearing first.
While some are more than others a blog is supposed to be interactive. That is what they were originally meant for. There is a place at the bottom of each post for visitors to leave comments and message one another using other widgets on the site. Besides the fact that the content changes on a regular basis this is what made blogs so popular during the last eight years: its interactivity.
Most blogs will have its commentary or news items revolve around a certain subject or niche. A smaller group of blogs function as online personal diaries. Your typical blog will combine text, links to other sites and video related to its topic on the posts. Standard HTML sites do this as well but as stated its content does not change at regular intervals and its visitors cannot leave comments on them. While most blogs are primarily textual (lots of words!!) there are some that focus on photography, art, music, audio and video. There is also something called microblogging which features extremely short posts.
Technorati, a search engine just for blogs, says that it was tracking over 112,000,000 blogs as of 2007.
How Can They Be Used for Advertising Purposes?
Google likes content. That is no mystery. Since blogs are content rich in nature they are highly favored by Google. Its very easy for a blog to rank for all kinds of juicy keywords within a specific niche because it will usually have tons of content on the subject.
Additionally, blog owners can develop a large following if it provides great entertainment, proves itself informative to its readers or people find the posts provocative (some sites are just well known because they ruffle feathers).
Here is where blog advertising comes in. You can use blogs that are receiving traffic to a) sell something b) promote a product for yourself or someone else or c) refer your readers to someone else who sells something.
If the subject is general it will be hard to make money from the traffic because the visitors are not looking for anything specific. But if it is one that stays within a specific niche then it will be easy to generate revenue from it. The visitors will usually come to the blog with a need and you can make money by filling that need.
How Do You Get Traffic To A Blog
This is where knowledge of search engine optimization comes in. You do not have to be an expert on the subject but you do need to be familiar with it. As time goes by the better you understand it the more traffic you will be able to drive to your website.
Getting traffic to your site will require Google to send you daily visitors. This happens when one of your posts appear on page one for a keyword or long tail phrase someone types in.
You do this by:
- getting relevant links from other websites
- doing the proper keyword research and putting them into your content (without keyword stuffing)
- well written content that people want to read
- having good meta information
- well built permalinks
- good site structure with well placed internal linking
Each of these techniques must be learned to properly advertise your blog. Some of them will take a while to master. Out of all of them proper keyword research and link building will be the hardest one to learn and implement. It will be slow at first as you will have the think of the entire Internet in a completely different way than you did before. You will have to go from just thinking like a user to thinking like a marketer.
If you get tons of traffic and then learn how to direct a portion of that traffic to something that makes money then you have mastered the art of blog advertising. In a nutshell that is what it is all about. No matter if you want to make adsense revenue or some other type of income you can get paid to blog if you invest in the proper education. The really valuable kind will not come cheap.
