Online Marketing with Blogs

It may be an even better idea to use blogs for online marketing than it was only a few years ago.

That's because blogs may be gaining influence and traffic as a result of and not in spite of big social media sites like Facebook, one study finds.

Farmers' Market
Originally uploaded by NatalieMaynor

PostRank, an Ontario, Canada-based company that measures what's called "engagement" across the World Wide Web, says blogs create a lot of it

Basically, engagement is the amount of activity including commenting that correlates to any piece of online content, say, a blog post, for example.

PostRank is in the business of providing this information to online publishers like bloggers and others interested in their content.

Now, while PostRank's Ilya Grigorik writes in a recent post that more commenting is occuring on other sites like Facebook and Twitter, the effect of these sites has not been to take the discussion or the focus away from blogs.

Instead, the social media sites have given bloggers ever larger reservoirs of potential readers and fans.

These people may comment on Facebook or Twitter about their favorite blog post instead of on the blog itself but will end up directing even larger numbers of readers back by linking and commenting in an online community possibly filled with others also fitting the blogger's niche.

All of this has apparently also had the effect of increasing the shelf life of an average blog post as it is further distributed in discussions across the "social Web".

Since the cost of using a blog whether you create one yourself or hire a professional blogger remains low this further increases your ROI for blogs who certainly have a longer term impact than other media marketing much more expensive.

For more, read "50% Increase in Engagement with Blog Posts after Day One" from Niall Devitt at Bloggertone.