Blogvertising

Blogvertising (We know it’s not a word)

Blogs can offer an excellent avenue for advertising. Though in order to be successful you must find the right blog. There are three archetypes for blogs:

Personal Blogs

These blogs are usually written by a single person and read like an online diary, recounting the feelings, opinions and musings of the author. While personal blogs can be used effectively for advertising it is often difficult to find one that is both open to advertising and has the right following to be effective.

Corporate Blogs

Corporate blogs are written by people officially affiliated with a certain company. This blog is an example of a corporate blog; I am writing for Clocktower Media on a blog hosted off of the official Clocktower Media website (Clocktowermedia.com/blog). Corporate blogs usually focus on company news and products or industry related information. Avoid corporate blogs for advertising. While they may discuss your industry they usually have relatively small followings and will not be open to advertising for their competition.

Topical Blogs

Topical blogs are the perfect place to advertise. They are generally very targeted and written on a particular subject area. For example, there might be a fishing blog. On this blog various bloggers write about fishing and things related to fishing. If your company sells fishing poles, this might be a perfect place to advertise. Usually these types of blogs will actually welcome advertising if your company has a product that will interest their readers. For example readers of a fishing blog would welcome advertisements about the latest fishing poles and gear. The trick is finding the perfect topical blog that fits your company’s product.

The two biggest things to look for in a blog are subject matter and popularity.

Subject Matter

The subject matter of the blog is extremely important. It doesn’t matter how popular a blog is if the subject matter doesn’t fit your product the advertising will fail. So when you are researching blogs to find the perfect fit make sure you thoroughly read the blogs to get a good grasp of the kind of material each blog discusses. In our example of a fishing blog, there could be a fishing blog that discusses fishing techniques while another focuses more on fishing gear. While both blogs fit the fishing pole industry, the blog discussing gear would be a more natural place to advertise.

Popularity

It’s a popularity contest. It really does matter how many readers a blog gets. Even if the subject matter is perfect for your product, if the blog only has two readers it doesn’t matter. The difficulty with blogs is that they don’t say how many readers they have. Since there are no subscriptions or anything of that nature it is impossible to know exactly how many people read a blog. However, there are some useful tools for determining the popularity of a blog. Alexa.com will give an analysis of any website, including blogs. It will tell you how many sites link to the blog and an overall ranking. You can use these metrics to compare different blogs. Another is PRChecker.info. This website will give you a Google rank of any website. Anything above 4 is worth checking out. The Google rank is from 1-10 and works like the Richter scale where 5 is ten times more than 4. So it becomes increasingly difficult to raise your Google rank.

Unfortunately there is no formula for finding the perfect blog. You will have to do a lot of research and find a medium between popularity and subject matter.