Blog marketing was around since 2007 and had it’s own glorious days. I’ve been in the Internet advertising industry since 2002 and I kinda saw how things evolved. Now, blog advertising was a nice concept: bloggers write about advertiser’s product. Now, we all know that this was so… tricky since someone had the “brilliant” idea to include do-follow links in those posts.
So, quickly we saw an explosion of “blogs”, mainly from India, Indonesia, Malayesia. Main purpose? Money. No one cared about the quality or niche of those blogs. Of course that blog marketing still works because as long as there are people who pay, there will be people who’ll work.
Then Google came on stage and started to penalize blogs who were writing for money. At that point the blog advertising industry suffered a huge popularity decrease.
Still, these days there are still many who consider blog marketing as one of their main tools in their search engine optimization process.
What are the advantages of blog marketing?
1. Quick results: Although Google declared war to paid blogging, backlinks from quality blogs can still make a difference. With the new Google Caffeine I am anxiuous to research the importance of backlinks compared to the pre-caffeine era. Another quick result af blog marketing is a temporary flow of visitors.
2. Long term links: when it comes to websites there are a lot of versatility. Blogs make no exception. One day they are, the other they aren’t. But when an established blog decides to enter the blog advertising industry and writes about you, that backlink will stay there for a long time bacause at least theoretically once a blog is ald enough and it’s still in the web, there is no reason to dissapear.
3. It is cheap: compared to other similar result archieving services (like Inlinks.com who charge minimum /month/link) blog marketing is cheap. You can pay once $10 and your link may stay there forever.
Advantages for bloggers?
Bloggers can earn some money but in time that specific blog will end up by being destroyed because Page Rank will drop to 0, no more requests to write from advertisers, no more money, no more interest to keep it going.
Disadvantages of blog advertising
Unfortunately there are more disadvantages then advantages in blog marketing area.
1. Short life-time of blogs: As I stated earlier, bloggers who make a living from blog marketing don’t care about the so called “clean Internet. They want money. Period.
2. Bad quality of the written posts: Many times you won’t be capable to find a well written blog post.
3. Link removal, nofollow: After bloggers get paid, they many times tend to remove the links from the written posts or to apply a rel=”nofollow” tag. Reason? To avoid being penalised by Google.
4. Google penalization: Both bloggers and advertisers can be penalized by Google while in the blog marketing industry. Reason? Backlinks and Google’s efforts to stop everything that’s not natural linking. Usualy blog marketers can ask bloggers to rel=nofollow their links. This way, Google’s strike can be avoided, but as you can guess… this ain’t happening.
Conclusion
Blog marketing will stay in both advertiser’s and blogger’s attention still for a long time from now on because has some advantages if done right. Advertising on blogs is a good way to get some attention and it’s better then article submission, link exchange techniques, and bad quality web directory submissions.
Note:
To avoid Google from following a hyperlink, all you have to do is to add this tag:
rel="nofollow"when you build the link. Please pay attention, because this way Page Rank won’t pass (link juice).