In a bad economy I still find blog advertising as the best solution for my company

In this bad economy I am still finding that blog advertising is the best solution for my company. Every marketing guru out there insists that word of mouth advertising is the best advertising there is. The problem my company was facing was how to get people talking about us and our online business.After a year in business, we were still operating in the red. We just couldn’t generate the buzz that would take us to the next level. I tried the trade shows. All that resulted in was jet lag and less money in the marketing budget. The problem I found with trade shows was that I was marketing to the marketers. I needed to reach the consumers.I contracted the services of a well known email marketing company. I figured the best way to get our name out there would be to put it in front of our customers. It sounded good on paper. Unfortunately, most of those emails probably ended up in spam boxes. Those that made it through annoyed more potential customers than got them to my site them judging from our pitiful traffic.How to do that with the limited budget of a new start-up was the question. I paid attention to my competition. More and more I was seeing them mentioned on popular blogs. Now this was the word of mouth advertising I needed. I figured I would need to expand my customer base first before I would ever register on the blog community radar though.I was wrong again! A good friend mentioned sponsoredreviews to me. Curious, I checked it out. Imagine my surprise that I could generate word of mouth buzz without having to woo them with expensive product promos for reviews. I was definitely intrigued and decided to give it a go.The price was right. Think about it. How often does anyone actually click on those paid ad boxes and banner ads? Pop-up ads are just annoying. Blog posts are subtle enough that no one gets annoyed with blatant advertising. With paid blog advertising my customers are finding me from a source they trust.That is the key. Blog advertising posts are done by real people, not some marketing department. People tend to read blogs they enjoy written by bloggers whose opinions match their own. If the blogger mentions my products, then the reader will be inclined to check out my company. They trust the blogger, therefore they extend that trust to me.Our first campaign was a success. We stuck to just a few blogs to see how it worked out and within a week our website traffic had increased 50%. Even better, they were buying! By the end of the first 30 days, we were receiving five times as much traffic than before with virtually no effort on my part.After I started using blog advertising, our Google PageRank went up and our company was taking up the first few pages in the search engines. It seems everyone was talking about us! Our profits were soaring, despite the dire economy. Since I’m reaching customers around the globe, thanks to blog advertising, I am reaching people with buying power that far exceeds that of my local economy. I am finding that an international customer base is really the key to continued profitability.Every time we expand our product line, hundreds of bloggers are sharing the press release with their readers. A few weeks later hundreds of reviews of the product drives even more traffic our way. The best part is the traffic is targeted. These customers are clicking on our website because they want to be there, not because they were trying to close a pop-up ad or delete an email. They are reading about us on a blog they trust and coming to visit because they like what they read.This is the best investment I ever made. It cost less than other forms of advertising that don’t target the customers nearly as well, and the benefits to our bottom line have been tremendous. I now have access to elusive word of mouth buzz I had thought was beyond my companies current reach. It keeps snowballing, too. The more people read about us, the more they want to see for themselves what we have to offer. I have to say that paid blog advertising is definitely something that every business owner needs to try.