Blogging - Why Marketers Should Use Blogs

Case Study Article 9

This article was written as part of our case study to attempt to bring in 5,000 visitors in 30 days. You can read more about our other case studies below.

Don't let the popular name of blogging misrepresent its usefulness or effectiveness for you, as a business person. Like social network sites, traditional news media seem to love characterizing blogs as 'lowbrow', highly personal, often mad, frequently prurient, mostly partisan displays of highly subjective and often wrong comments and opinion. That may or may not be a fair generalization, but either way it shouldn't concern you. Bogging is first and foremost a technology.

The term 'blog' really means two things; it is a verb and a noun - it is in the use of 'blog' as a verb where the characterizations lie; 'to blog' is to write and publish a blog and this activity is what attracts a perceived scorn. But the word 'blog' is also a noun and refers to the technology itself, and when talking or reading about blogs, bloggers and blogging we should all keep our attention upon that use of the word since it is in the technology that the power lies, not in the perceived worth of 'some' of the output. Any truly democratic medium will have a wide variance of quality and use, but to characterize all output and all users of the medium as worthy of equal scorn because of the perceived low level of some users is unbalanced.

Blog technology allows instant publication in a simple fashion of all and any content, and facilitates its swift circulation to search engines and syndications. Purely and simply, this is a technology for the masses and the specialists alike. There is nothing about the technology itself which makes its output 'lowbrow' partisan, prurient, or anything else, and characterizations of blogs as such are no different to those characterizations of the internet as nothing more than pornography highways. There is far more to it than that.

Unfortunately, the use to which something is put will often end up characterizing something more conclusively than the real potential within it. Blogs are a case of this injustice; but serious and successful business people use blogs in increasing numbers because they see the power in the technology and don't care what it's called.

From a marketer's point of view, blogs and blog platforms can provide excellent product sites, marketing sites, sales pages and reviews. With the expansion of blog functionality, especially with the Open Source Word press platform, blogs have taken on more and more of what was traditionally the functionality of a fully fledged html or php custom coded site. It has become possible to have all the functionality of a traditional website but with all the ease of use, speed of publishing, and search engine benefits of a blog.

What's more, you can get much of this for free with any one of the very many blog network hosting services which are run, and hosted, by the developer, like: Blogger, LiveJournal and Xanga, or even MySpace or Windows Live Spaces. Word press itself even has a hosting service where their software is pre installed for you. All these services require no installation at all, and cost nothing, and merely ask that you create a simple membership with minimal details.

From a marketer's perspective there are clear and obvious advantages to having access to a variety of networks which allow the free creation of multiple sites; especially where these sites require little more than a few choices regarding look and feel and then allow the user to fill them with content and leverage the power of a large blogging network to pull in visitors and alert the search engines to your presence.

Typically, an entire online marketing campaign might make use of blogging solutions. Especially in the case of an affiliate marketing campaign, the blog network is becoming part of the core affiliate marketing standard model. An affiliate marketer will create a domain name based upon the affiliate program they are promoting, and then do a simple install of the free Word press Open Source blogging platform software. They will choose from many thousands of free Word press 'templates' a layout and graphics which suit their promotion and install that then create a sales page for their product on the Word press site.

Next, they will create accounts on a variety of the free blog networks and create blogs reviewing and discussing the affiliate product, with links to the sales page. This they will multiply again and again producing more and more visitors to the sales page from the high volume of traffic which consistently passes through each of the blog networks. Cost so far? From one to ten dollars for a domain name, and a few dollars to host the Word press sales page. It is a solid model entirely based upon the blogging platforms and very effective. Don't let bad publicity put you off - blogs are a marketer's dream.