Advertising on blogs

Chad has a great post with 7 reasons you should be advertising on blogs. Now, admittedly, he has a slight bias as he works as Director of Sales for b5media, the blogging network that this blog belongs to. But he has some good points.

Bloggers are very influential: This is the big one. The powerful influencers are quickly shifting to the small voice. I’m not talking Oprah here, I’m talking about the single parent stay at home mom that loves the book, the 4 hour work week, and hates windows vista. Bloggers are generating dedicated readers and followers that not only test out or buy a product that they recommend, but the readers too are blogging about it. It’s a waterfall of influence if even one prominent blogger likes your product. I reference those to products, because that book popularity was spurn in the blogosphere and Vista was killed by it. Bloggers can make or break your product. Get in front of them early and let your product grow with them

As a proponent of social, I talk about engaging with your evangelists, the bloggers and online communicators that want to talk about your brand. But sometimes it’s right to just advertise, to put some money into the system and attract attention that way. It should be considered as part of the overall communications plan, where you may be doing outreach as well, but you need to be careful that you do not necessarily compromise the blogger by askign them to write about you whilst you are advertising as well.