Blog marketing is any process that publicises or advertises a website, business, brand or service via the medium of blogs. This includes, but is not limited to marketing via ads placed on blogs, recommendations and reviews by the blogger, promotion via entries on third party blogs and cross-syndication of information across multiple blogs.
The pros of blog marketing
Blog marketing is a long-term strategy. When done properly, it is a highly effective marketing method that brings incredible results. The following are the main pros of blog marketing for your business:
- Organic traffic increase to your website. The primary goal of running a blog marketing strategy is bringing organic traffic to your site. The more people end up on your site, the higher the number of potential customers that are likely to buy your products or services.
- Becoming an authority in your niche. The better the content you share with people, the more influence your brand is going to have. By actively blogging, your brand becomes alive, and people start building trust within your brand. If more people see you as an authority in your niche, there’s a good chance that you’ll see an increase in sales. Assuming that you have strong calls to action to increase conversion rates and offer quality products.
- Low-cost advertising. Blog marketing is relatively cheap, all you have to do is find a writer who will regularly publish posts on your blog. Often, employees within a company can write content, or even the owner himself can invest time in content creation.Â
The cons of blog marketing
There are some downsides to blogging. So, before starting a blog, make sure that you are aware of them. It will help you create a better plan that will bring you good results:
- It takes the time to build good content. Time investment is the biggest downside to creating high-quality content. You need to establish a plan that will allow you to invest time in your blog. The whole process is quite demanding but, when done properly, incredibly rewarding.
- The results will come gradually. The benefits of a high-quality blog can be seen only later down the road. It is the primary reason why people steer away from it. The risk of hiring a writer only to feel the benefits after a year of blogging is something that not everyone is willing to take.
Advantages of blog marketing
Blog marketing has many advantages for online marketing. Firstly, brand awareness can be enormously strengthened through far-reaching posts on selected blogs. On the other hand, blog marketing provides a platform to positively launch products on the market as part of testing.
Other pluses are high flexibility and speed. Published content can be on the web and depending on topic, circulated on social networks within a few hours. At the same time, marketers can quickly react to topic changes or news and post in appropriate blogs.
Limitations
If blog marketing is done sensibly, it can be very successful. However, there are borderline cases in which this form of marketing is not worthy of its name.
There are now thousands of blogs that deal with the issue of product testing. In many cases publishers are more concerned about obtaining a product cheaply or for free than testing it in an objective and appealing way. In such cases, advertisers must carefully consider whether a publication might be worth it and whether it would contribute to the reputation of the company if the brand or the name of the store appears on an inferior blog.
