According to Jeremy Wright, author of the book Blog Marketing, the core needs for any business are as follows:
Decent ideas
A great product
Visibility
A well-trained team of people who work hard to make the company succeed
I one word, what a business needs is good marketing. While people often associate marketing with just the visibility part, marketing actually covers everything from product development to packaging, promotion and distribution. Used in everyday language though the term marketing is used synonymously with advertising and promotion. This is what this article is all about.
While good ideas and products are necessary a business won’t be able to sell much of anything without the third need, which is visibility. For a product or service to gain visibility one needs to come up with a sound marketing strategy. A good marketing campaign usually makes utilizes more than one marketing technique in order to reach the target audience. One of the most popular marketing strategies nowadays is internet marketing. Internet marketing though features a wide variety of methods used by marketers to reach the online audience. Some of the methods used in internet marketing include article marketing, paid search, email marketing and blog marketing.
All the marketing methods mentioned above are extremely popular but blog marketing has a characteristic that makes it stand out - the blogger’s participation. While most marketing methods are more traditional in approach in the sense that the ads are generated and distributed solely by the advertisers, blog marketing is changing the way advertising works since many aspects depend on the blogger. To explain this concept more clearly let us enumerate the usual kinds of advertisements used in blogs.
1. Targeted ads - the most popular example being Google Adsense; this includes both image (banner) and text ads
2. Text links - used in a variety of ways and often in conjunction with number 3
3. Sponsored posts/entries
While some blogs still do post banner ads that are not targeted the practicing is become rare and is not really worth mentioning.
For targeted ads it is still the advertiser that is responsible for the actual advertisement. However, the blogger is also responsible for which ads appear since the ads that will be shown will depend on the content of the blog. For text links the ad won’t really even be shown until the reader clicks on the link and is sent to the advertiser’s website. Text links can be an annoyance to some readers though since there is usually no indication that the link leads to a business website instead of a simple informative site. This usually happens when bloggers use generic terms and don’t really mention the product before hand. Sponsored posts or entries make use of text links but require the blogger to give a review of the product. There are different payment policies with sponsored posts with some paying for each post, whether readers click on the link or not, and with some requiring the link to be clicked before the blogger gets any payment. Usually though it is a combination of both schemes.
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