Blog Marketing Goes Direct

May 25, 2007

In today’s marketing landscape, it is going to be very difficult for you to avoid the question of marketing online. If you are comfortable with it, great; if not, you seriously have to take a good look at it. One of the areas that is growing in significance is blog marketing.

This is where advertisers get bloggers to write about their products and/or services. There are many avenues for advertisers to connect with bloggers. In our off-line world, these are called “media houses”, here, they are known as the blog marketplace. Advertisers today are getting more savvy and have begun to select specific blogs to write for them as opposed to throwing out global opportunities through the marketplace.

There are a few challenges when advertisers try to go direct with bloggers. One of the key concerns would be security. Communicating with each other through email seems innocent enough, until you start thinking about potential spammers. Then there is the concern about bloggers who get paid but delete the posts immediately after, and on and so forth. Besides this, consider “ease of use”. If you used a blog marketplace, say for example, PayPerPost.com; they handle almost every process for you. Going direct means you have to do the selection, monitoring, payment and follow up yourself.

But using the blog marketplace means cost. There are a few reputable partners you can work with. But they usually charge anywhere from 50% – 100% of the blogger fees as part of their commission. To provide the services that they do, you would expect to pay a fee; but 100%? One of the more famous paid brokers,PayPerPost has introduced a new feature to their blog marketplace- PayPerPost Direct. This service now provides the facility for you to directly engage with the blogger. The good news here is, the blogger gets paid more, and PayPerPost Direct only takes a 35% fee. This is a fraction of what its competitors are asking. It’s a win-win proposition: the blogger gets paid more, the advertiser knows his fees are paying for the effort and not a huge chunk going to the intermediary.

PayPerPost Direct allows bloggers to put up a badge on their blogs so that any potential advertisers who chance upon their blog and would like to have a review or post done by them, can click on it. There is a very good overview video to be found at the PayPerPost’s Blog – PayPerPost Direct Intro Video.