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The topic is often discussed in the blogosphere: how to monetise your blog and, of course, one of the obvious ways is to be paid to post.
Whilst this may seem an easy option, it can be quite difficult to find people willing to pay for you to post to your own blog about their products. The big guys have usually a larger audience than you through their own sites, have their own copywriters and blogs, and/or have previously been bitten if the posts appear on blogs which then have content they are unhappy to be associated with; many of the smaller companies who might want a written endorsement of their products often haven’t grasped what the blogosphere is about yet; and some of the posts pay a pittance.
Additionally, Google started to take a dim view of paid for posts when some sites passed PageRank through these posts, which then affected the ‘level playing field’ in the SERPs. Google has quality guidelines for bloggers, and anyone violating them will find themselves plummeting down the rankings and their traffic dropping off accordingly. Which of course then means it is ever harder to find companies willing to pay you to post because your page views and audience have also dropped.
Using the ‘nofollow’ attribute is a must if you intend to accept pay for posts; however, many people actively seek out blogs that use ‘dofollow’ to comment upon for marketing purposes. You win some, you lose some!
Google’s other problem with pay for posts is highlighted in Matt Cutt’s sponsored conversations post. Here he illustrates how a ‘pay for post’ for a brain surgery technique could potentially overtake a more serious website with real information required by those who are researching brain surgery. I guess I would take a pretty dim view of being inundated with this type of advertorial if I were researching that sort of subject too.
For SEO and search engine marketing, the benefits of writing a blog are many fold.
Firstly, you can add regular detailed commentary to your site which includes keywords and long tail terms that will enable your site to be found on the search engines for a wider variety of search terms.
You can build up a short series of articles on a particular subject which highlights your expertise, the benefits of your products and services, and helps to provide an online archive of useful information for your website visitors.
Most blog engines now use the title to create the page URL so it is a good idea to include additional keywords for commonly searched terms within the blog title for search engine optimisation.
A blog can become a conversation with your target audience. By keeping it short and ‘chatty’ with questions that encourage interactivity, you can begin to grow a community of interested readers.
For this reason, it should be easy to add comments to your blog, and also to contact you and your company easily should anyone wish to.
Blog posts need not be cumbersome, nor time consuming to write. A few minutes posting regularly can lead to a growing readership, and your blog posts can be tied into multiple places, such as your Facebook or social network pages, you can encourage people to sign up to your RSS feed, the blog posts can be added to an email newsletter etc.
Readers of blogs often search the blogrolls of well-known blogs to find other similar sources of information, so making friends with other blogs can lead to valuable backlinks to your blog.
The search engines like websites with regularly updated content and blogs help to achieve just that.
There are millions of blogs online, covering every imaginable topic, so what are you waiting for?! Use the Google Blogsearch tool to find a niche in your particular area of expertise and start blogging today!
Google has launched a new blog searching tool, Blogsearch. It offers the chance to search for tech, business, gaming, science, entertainment, TV and movies, amongst other subjects, as well as by keyword. There seems to be a wide range of blogs indexed, rather than just the A list bloggers, so you get a reasonably broad view of what is being said across the blogosphere on a particular subject or news item.
If you want to track what is happening in your niche, with your products, or what consumers think of your competitors and you, this is definitely a place to stop in regularly. It should be tied in with monitoring delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Friendfeed etc if you wish to stay abreast of events and news.
Blogs allow you to get a good handle on consumer issues, trends, new products in your niche, views and opinions, as well as finding information in blog circles that may lead you to new opportunities, new markets, and new customers.
Technorati have conducted interesting research into the blogosphere and produced the State of the Blogosphere 2008 Report.
This comprehensive report highlights not only who are the bloggers, but also what they are blogging about, how to monetise blogs, and becoming brand advocates.
Blogging is a very useful marketing tool for a business these days, and many bloggers are being approached to become brand advocates by companies who understand the value of such a service. And service it is, as 6 out of 10 bloggers report that they are offered payment of some kind to post reviews of products, services, retail experiences and so on.
Bloggers are also raising revenue from their blogs with the top 1% earning over $200,000 per year from their blogs. This is mainly through advertising, but there are also some bloggers being paid to post. Contextual ads (eg Google Adsense) are used by 38% of the bloggers surveyed, and one can see how a company blog could add to its revenue stream with this method.
However, almost half those interviewed reported having no advertising on their blogs, with the main reasons given being not wishing to clutter the blog with ads, not being interested in making money, or not having any visitors to make it worthwhile.
Building a blog to have a following of regular readers can seem hard work, but the repayment in both loyal customers, good PR and even a residual income from ads would seem to make the effort worthwhile for any sized business. Additionally, it can add many long tail keywords for the SEO on your website plus an archive of useful information for visitors to your website.
