Blog Marketing

Blog marketing is a means of online advertising. In cooperation with bloggers, companies can place and promote themselves and their products via guest posts on blogs.

Definition

The term blog marketing can be used to describe two different phenomena. On the one hand, this can mean marketing a blog or a blog post in order to earn money with it. On the other hand, this can also mean a content marketing strategy to advertise with a blog.

In this case, for example, bloggers offer other authors or entrepreneurs to publish an article on their platform. A similar variation is when the blogger themselves write a post on behalf of the company.

The term is also used to avoid talking about a link exchange via a Guest Post.

What is a blog?

In a blog, authors – private individuals, entrepreneurs, institutions – can write texts with the help of usually free content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress or Blogspot. Most of the time, these texts are not about purely informative content, but about more or less trivial things. Blogs are thus much more subjective and reflect the opinion of the author on a topic.

Through advertising, affiliate links and other means of monetization, blogs have evolved into a medium from which some, often English-speaking, writers can make a living. The subjective and low-threshold nature of blogs makes them attractive to a large audience. This reach allows bloggers to shape public debates on various topics.

Blog Marketing as a way to reach customers

In the meantime, entrepreneurs have also discovered this reach for themselves. Used correctly, a blog can become the start of a conversion funnel. By collaborating with bloggers – such as through guest posts – businesses can leverage the reach of blogs.

So they use successful blogs to promote themselves and their products. Another way of blog marketing is when companies themselves write blogs about their products or services to offer more content.

When using strategic blog marketing as a means of content marketing, business owners first create marketing plans and learn about the reach and influence of various blogs. Most of the time, bloggers write the posts for a company themselves afterwards to make the topics seem as authentic as possible.

Blog marketing – done right – quicklygenerates a wide reach without coming across as offensive advertising. This is why it is particularly suitable for issues that need to reach a particularly large audience. This could be testing or launching a new product, or crisis PR.

Opportunities and risks of blog marketing

With blog marketing, business owners can leverage the reach of successful bloggers and generate high-quality advertising relatively quickly, more akin to an advertorial than authentic blog posts. But this remedy also carries certain risks. Many a writer from a blog that features and tests products may want to get a product for free rather than actually test it. A product test that is pushed forward in this way quickly appears cheap to the user and can do more harm than good to the reputation of the company. That’s why advertisers must always be careful to target blog marketing and make sure it’s good quality – even if the product review is a little more ambivalent.Blogs are also classic venues for link exchanges. Two authors write a small guest post for each other, with the goal of placing a backlink.

Conclusion

Blog marketing is a means by which businesses can quickly generate quality publicity. In collaboration with authors who run successful blogs, they can thus take advantage of a wide reach. In doing so, both advertisers and bloggers need to make sure that they ensure good quality posts. An obvious promotional post hurts a company’s reputation and displeases a blog’s audience. Because there are already too many overtly promotional blogs, more and more readers are perceiving blog marketing as surreptitious advertising.