Blog Advertising and Feed Marketing

A blog displays periodic posts (items or articles) in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Blogs came to the forefront of perception during the late 1990s, when they were used for political effect with great success.

Blogs that cater to specific interests like gadgets, exercise, diet, health, or politics, for example, attract like-minded readers. Then, the problem changes from finding members of the target market to how best to serve them advertising. 

Blog Advertising

Many of the same ways you monetize a website hold true for blogs.  You may choose Yahoo! ads, Google ads, Amazon ads, affiliate links, product banners, Kontera links, more below.  Just be sure your blog is clutter free and that your advertising is tastefully done.

CMF Ads - Low cost, no-nonsense advertising. Similar to Entrecard,but the system is more transparent.

Blog Marketing

There are many social networking sites for bloggers.  You will see badges on blogs that say, Join My NAME Community.  I will name some of them, but you should explore for yourself.  

Blog Village: Blog Village is a large community of 300+ bloggers. You join and add your banner to the Blog Village site. Then you add a Blog Village banner to your site so that people can click on it to rank your blog. There are many great bloggers in all fields.  If interested, please join here.

MyBlogLog  and MyBlogCatalog: The two blogging communities work basically the same way.  You join and add your sites.  Then you design and add a widget to your site that will show the name and picture of visitors from that community.  From within these communities, you can add contacts, which are people who may contact you on the site; join neighborhoods of specific blogs; or join specialty groups, formed by members.

Blog Feeds

Syndicate your blog content or feed to gain visibility and exposure, traffic, readers and subscribers, and authority and credibility in your field. Blog and website feeds provide web content or summaries of web content with links to the full version of that content on your site.  Feeds allow Internet users to subscribe to a blog or to view syndicated news headlines, data feed, or other websites that periodically update content.  Using a browser or feed reader, the subscriber is able to view updated content almost instantly.

Blog Formats

RSS is an acronym for several web feed formats. Atom is another feed format used by Blogger. Like Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) used to format a web page, markup languages are used to identify the components of a document.  The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) defines feed content (text and graphics) and the placement and format of that content.  For example, XML helps differentiate a heading from a footnote, text from graphics, columns from headers and footers. 

Example Blog Formats and Feeds

	Visit CoolAdzine for Marketers - actual Blog
	Visit CoolAdzine for Marketers - browser-friendly XML feed from Feedburner

Notes on Blog and Feed Examples

	The actual blog is more aesthetically pleasing, allows email subscription, and commenting.  The reader may explore and follow links to more information.
	The browser-friendly feed from Feedburner includes instructions for adding your feed to various readers.  The links point to the original blog post for commenting.  This is a syndicated feed that is easily indexed by search engines and downloaded to handheld devices.
	Feed Validator - check your feed before you syndicate.  This tool checks your feed to see if it is working correctly from a technical point of view.

Feed Marketing

Delivering targeted advertising through feeds is not a new concept. You may add Google adwords for feeds to your feed or join an advertising network like Feedburner and serve up text or image advertisements. Usually people read feeds for information and advertising should be unobtrusive..

Unlike email, feeds allow subscribers to control their information streams from the start.  If they like a site, they subscribe. With feed readers and browser-based aggregators, the subscriber may easily scan the list of headlines (which may be limited to those updated within the past day or hour), and either read or ignore them.

Feed Syndication

Feed syndication is the new email, but better.  It is opt-in and SPAM free. Many publishers are seeing a 40 percent month-over-month growth rate in their feed traffic. Many are seeing 50 percent of their traffic come from their feeds, with a corresponding decline in email subscriptions. By syndicating feeds, publishers are simplifying the process for readers to subscribe.

Marketers have watched feeds develop as an advertising tool over the past few years. As the technology for publishing feeds becomes easier to use, more marketers are publishing feeds.  Likewise, advertisers are easily reaching new markets segments.  Feedburner offers a free service for syndication.

Resources for Blog and Feed Marketing

Blog Traffic Exchanges

Blog Advance is a free manual blog surf exchange community offering 1:1 ratio and free forum.

Blog Clicker was one of the first blog traffic exchanges several years ago. It disappeared when the owners lost control of the domain name (lesson for everyone). BlogClicker is back online. You may want to check it out if you are looking to marketing your blogs.

Blog Explosion is a blog community.  You may add multiple blogs, podcasts, text links and banners. List your blog or podcast with BlogExplosion blog and/or podcast directory, and even rent space to other bloggers,  There is a chat room with prizes, blog rocket to get your blog read, blog lottery!  Battle of the Blogs is where you go head to head with other bloggers for a big percentage of the credits waged.

Blog Directory and RSS Submission

You promote your website, you must promote your blogs.  Directories and submission sites are the fastest way to do this.  Robin Good has put together a site called RSSTop55 and it lists all the sites to which you should submit your blog and/or feed.

Bloggeries is a paid blog directory.  Bloggeries has a page rank of 6/10 and an Alexa ranking of 68,820, which means it is fully indexed and visited regularly. 

Tagging

Why Tag

Tagging helps us to personalize our experience on the Internet. Tagging allows group sharing of knowledge, making it easier to find content. Tagging is social in that it facilitates social groups forming around common interests. When I began blogging, I started using Technorati tags, which I still use today.  Although Technorati has changed its complete business plan, I have grown use to using them.

Who Tags

Taggers are early adopters of technology, mostly under 40 years old with higher educational and income levels, and likely to have a home broadband Internet connection. Members of minorities that go online are more likely to tag than Caucasians. Men and women are equally likely to be taggers.

Where to Tag

Here are two popular sites that use tags to categorize content.

Flickr – a photo sharing site
YouTube – a video-sharing site

Future of Tagging

Tagging has become more mainstream because of the platforms that make it easier to tag Internet content. Google allows labeling to organize email, Amazon encourages users to label published materials, Yahoo has made it easier to tag and store web pages. Most blogging platforms support tagging or labeling. Many software programs for managing content and images allow tagging to find content.

Tagging Sites on Socializer

Below are just the top services for tagging sites on Socializer, a tool for automatic social bookmarking. By adding a snippet of code to your site, you will facilitate bookmarking and tagging.

Tagging Using Add This

Another tagging service has become quite popular. Add this is a lot like Socializer, but have many more services available.  Here is the latest list:

Whew! I do not know half of those sites and there are more every day. 

Updated 01/25/2011

Send Questions, Suggestions, and Compliments to:
Eileen Trainor aka CyberCelt
Web Mistress and Writer
San Marcos * Texas * USA
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