How Blogging Impacts Mainstream Marketing

Because I'm a journalist and copywriter who also reads and writes blogs, people who
don't use the Internet as much as I do have started to ask me some searching
questions of late. Some of them sound worried.

They have heard a lot about blogging and the impact it could have on traditional
marketing.

One person even asked me (perhaps a little concerned) if PR teams will be replaced
with bloggers. I don't see it, I reassured them.

PR is also about managing people and that will always be important. The
mainstream media isn't about to disappear, and the majority of the population
probably couldn't care less about blogs. For all the hype, blogging should be seen
as a potential addition to a marketing portfolio.

The place blogging may have its biggest impact is on areas of the trade press.
There is a revolution in publishing taking place, sparked by the new forms of
advertising such as Google ad sense. This has made it possible for someone
running a blog site, with a staff of one and overheads of almost nothing, to start
earning a living from their publishing.

If the blogger can get readers, then Google places the ads (relevant to the content)
and you have a publishing business. This gives a lot of people an incentive to
provide great content so that they get more readers, and more money from ads.

It's just like the traditional press, but without the need for offices, advertising sales
teams, HR departments etc.

This works best in niche areas. Soon, there may not be much need for magazines
about new gadgets, or mobile phones, or ride-on-lawn mowers or whatever.
Because the blogs have it covered, providing more up-to-date information and
readers who are ready to buy and can simply click on the advert.

The everyday bloggers have a new-found power and are not about to go away.
Some blogs now get millions, even tens of millions of readers a day. They are
rivalling the mainstream media and if the US government can't control them, what
chance does a small company or even a big enterprise have?

Companies and blogs
It's still pretty early days for companies using blogs, and the whole thing is evolving.
It will probably settle down into one more piece in the jigsaw, another
communication channel that companies can use.

The style used in company blogs needs to be less "written by committee" and more
personal and spontaneous.

Companies that try to use too much subterfuge in the blogging world are exposing
themselves to a potential backlash. There's a great emphasis on honesty in the
blogging world for example bloggers will often end a post with a "disclosure" note
which mentions any conflict of interest.

At a simple level, blogging can be seen as simply another way of publishing
information on the Internet. It's useful because it is so fast and it's easy to get a
range of people involved quite quickly.

However, there are real skills involved to good blogging. Not only does the writing
have to be engaging, colourful, funny, informative etc, but the writer also needs to
take account of search engine optimisation techniques which basically means
using the right keywords to ensure the blog shows up in the search engines.

At it's most sophisticated, blogging is being used to create "viral marketing"
campaigns to create a "buzz" around a product as though this were coming from
ordinary people. This is a whole new field of marketing / advertising

UK copywriter and journalist Simon Townley has written advertising and marketing copy for hundreds of companies, including some of the biggest names in modern business. He can be contacted through http://www.simontownley.co.uk/ contact.htm. You can read and download more articles by Simon Townley, and which are free to webmasters, at: http://www.simontownley.co.uk. You are welcome to re-use this article on your website providing you dont change it, you include my byline and you provide a live link to my website.

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