Blog Marketing

Over the past 2 years, blogs has become a popular tool to market services and sell products online. What most people don't understand is what makes blogs different from websites.

Blogs were designed to separate general information which is does not change from day to day with current information that is interesting now but may not be interesting or relevant tomorrow or in 6 months. Blogs achieve this by updating blog servers like technorati as soon as information is posted to a blog. By sending an electronic message to these blog servers, individuals are notified of these blog posts almost instantly.
This differs from websites which are only indexed in the search engines once search engines visit a particular website. Popular websites are visited multiple times a day whereas small websites may only be visited in a few times per year.

Because of the format of blogs, many people interested in maximizing their present on the internet have integrated blogs into their websites to communicate to their online consumers on a daily or weekly basis. From a search engine marketing point of view, search engines have integrated the value of blogs into their algorythms so they can better differentiate active websites from abandoned websites. This has allowed smaller companies serving niche markets with limited budgets a chance to compete against some of the bigger companies with bigger budgets.

In addition, blogs have been utilized by companies from an external marketing purpose as well. One of the biggest issues companies have had in regard to link marketing has been to dependance of having other companies link to their websites. From a business perspective, this has created a poor return on investment due to the abuse by website developers and other website owners. As a result, companies have launched external blogs to promote short term projects, test new company initiatives, and other company related activities. This has allowed them a cost effective method of controlling links to their primary website while at the same time achieve exposure for short term projects or promotions.

How blogs will be used in the future is still up for debate, but at the present time, they are a valuable tool for website marketing on the internet.