Blog marketing is using blogs to create a form of income or sometimes it is used as a term for promoting your blog.

We will start with using blogs as a form of income.

There numerous ways to create a money making blog, you can use any or all of the following methods:

• Sell adverting – this can be placing advertising on your site with a service like Google Adsense or you can sell directly to businesses.
• Promote affiliate products – Affiliate products can cover just about anything. Using services like ClickBank, Chitka, Commission Junction, Amazon, etc. and other independent sites you can find a product that matches almost every niche. These will range from digital information (usually the highest percentage commissions) to physical products to automobiles.
• Lead capture – this is where you get paid for getting someone to sign up somewhere. Good examples are credit card companies and insurance companies that will pay you when ever some one clicks on you affiliate link and fills out a form on their sites. This can vary from a few cents per signup to twenty dollars or more per sign up.
• Selling products directly – this is where you either have your own product that you created or you have a product that you have a license to sell. The largest difference between selling your own product and selling affiliate products is that you get to keep 100% when you sell your own product.
• Traffic collection – this is a form of blog marketing that is similar to all of the above but you don’t make your money directly from your blog. Instead you use it as a targeted traffic source to build a reputation for another site. This site is an example of that. This blog is targeted at people that want to learn how to blog but I don’t sell anything directly from this site. Yes, there are affiliate links but the main purpose of this site is to find people that are interested in creating money making blogs and get them to purchase my product at Blogging Beginners. A side note here, there will still be a lot of good information on this site but Blogging Beginners will have much, much more and go into details. But you have to have good content if you expect any blog marketing method to succeed.

Now to the other way I have seen the term blog marketing used. Some people (not that many but a few) use the term blog marketing to refer to the act of marketing a blog. In other words, this is the method(s) they use to get their blog noticed.

There are a number of ways this is done:

• Search engine Optimization (SEO) – blogs especially WordPress blogs are excellent platforms to create sites that rank high in the search engines. This is due, in a large part, to the plugins you can use to customize your site.
• Web 2.0 – This are socially interactive websites where you can join or create communities, find friends or followers. These are usually used to inform people in your group (your friends and followers) about thing you find interesting and of course you find your own blog interesting.
• Social Bookmarking – These sites were originally designed to let you save your favorite sites on the web so you could access them from any computer with internet access in the world. They evolved into sites that let you share your favorites with other people with the same interests and some even evolved to the point where you can rate the links. By getting your blog listed in social bookmarking site you are promoting your blog. The more people that bookmark your blog the more traffic you will get.
• Back Links – are links from other sites pointing to your blog. By getting a lot of back links not only will you get traffic from the links themselves but you will also boost your search engine results.
• Directory submission – there are thousands of directories that cater to specific niches and directories like Technorati that cater to blogs. By submitting to these directories you are not only marketing your blog but you are creating back links and (depending on the directory) traffic.

These are the most common methods used to market blogs but there are others such as press releases, contests and more. Your best bet is to use as many as you can to get your blog noticed. If you are looking for a course that teaches all of these step by step check out Blogging Beginners

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.