Blogging has become so popular that everyone seems to have a blog now for one reason or another. Maybe everyone knows something you don’t know. There are many benefits to blogging. Of course, your blogs will be tailored to reap more results than the blogs created as a hobby.

Many people think of blogging as a platform for lonely teenagers to vent their feelings like a diary. While this is one use of a blog, it is not what we are going to talk about. It would work for Paris Hilton but not for us unless we’re famous.

We want to look at how blogging will fit in with your marketing strategy. Blogging is a great way for you to manage content on your site and set up content so that it is organized, fresh, and easy to follow. It is essential to create a blog if you want to get ahead in your market. The blog structure allows you more flexibility than a static site and can be one of the main players in your marketing strategy.

Plus have you noticed Fortune 500 Companies using blogs? There’s a reason for it. Anyway let’s look at some of the benefits of blogging for the serious business minded person:

1. Blogs are an easy way to stay in touch with other people and let them know what’s new. Even a new mother or father can benefit from the ease of reaching multiple people with one posting. Take that benefit and look at exponential values that could be achieved if used on a larger scale and you will see how you can tap into this benefit to reach a multitude of people. You can save time and money using blogging as a method of communication.

2. Blogs are an easy way to stay in touch with other people and let them know what’s new. Even a new mother or father can benefit from the ease of reaching multiple people with one posting. Take that benefit and look at exponential values that could be achieved if used on a larger scale and you will see how you can tap into this benefit to reach a multitude of people. You can save time and money using blogging as a method of communication.

3. This is one of the main points about blogging! Search engine marketing relies on many synchronized methods working together. One of the cheapest and easiest ways to create a web presence is to blog. You can develop top search engine rankings based on the popularity of your blog. Catch people’s attention with great content and links will aid you in your trip to the top of the search engine rankings.

4. Blogging is a simple way to provide fresh content. Not only does this lend credibility and interest to your website and pull in more visitors, it also will attract the search engines. Fresh content equals more web crawling from the search engine spiders.

5. A blog with RSS feeds will increase your visibility with blog and RSS search engines. You can build link popularity through RSS feeds when you are cited by other blogs or websites. Your links within your blog will also send you traffic if your content is of interest.

6. The cost/benefits are huge with blogging. With easy to use and cheap blogging tools, you can get started without a huge investment of time and money.

SEO in a blog is definitely the way to go. Blogs not only get your words out there, but allow for comments and RSS. You can optimize your blog to get attention with relevant keywords.

Just like any other marketing method, it can be indexed and therefore translate to rankings with the search engines. Thanks to the structure of blog softwares, it is relatively easy for search engine crawlers to detect and categorize the content, resulting in a better shot at high rankings.

You can use blog software to easily add active and attractive elements to your website to keep it fresh and inviting. The software can help you to post current events and news in your field, newsletters, updated FAQ’s, updated media, interesting correspondence, and relevant data.

Instead of just relying on a static web site that deters people from frequent visits, you can encourage regular visitors with constantly updated content, comment posting, cutting edge news, and a sense that your site is on the cutting edge of your field or industry. This translates to a site that attracts the search engines and produces high rankings.

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