When it comes to online marketing most people believe that the means and methods of advertising a product were limited to traditional text and banner advertisements, direct email campaigns, et al. Well, just when online marketing was pegged as being finite along came a radically new means of conducting online marketing in the form of “paid blogging.” This is an excellent method of marketing that combines traditional search engine optimization link placement with online product reviews. What a novel concept! Thanks to the incredible expansion of blogs on the internet this new method of online marketing is here to stay.

For those not familiar with what web logs (blogs) are they can be defined essentially as online journals that have replaced the traditional newsletters and fanzines of generations past. Blogs are authored by pretty much anyone who wishes to have a blog and they cover pretty much every topic under the sun. While the readership and page rank may vary, the collective audience for blogs worldwide is upwards of 70 million people. Yes, there are tens of millions of avid readers of blogs and this has opened the door for a tremendous way of using the blogs for marketing.

Of course, the traditional banner advertisement was used on blog sites, but this was not very lucrative for the bloggers so many blogs simply did not explore the placement of banner ads. Eventually, an ingenious idea emerged and it has spawned an incredibly innovative online marketing industry. Basically, online marketing firms began to pay bloggers to write promotional heralds or product reviews and then place requisite links to the products’ websites. This allows not only allows for successful search engine optimization, but it also allows for solid textual promotion of the product that is targeted directly to the readers of the blog. This has proven to be a wildly successful formula that has drawn in tens of thousands of advertisers and continues to draw more and more.

Again, what makes this type of online marketing successful is that it directly appeals to a segment of the blog’s readership. This makes the advertising direct as opposed to incidental and that means the response to the advertisement is much stronger than the traditional method. In a way, it is more of a plug from a successful author and that translate into a greater response that tossing out an ad here and there.

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