A thought provoking question. When it comes to blog marketing, how far would you go? Would you use Google Adsense? Would you use some other form of paid advertising?
There is no simple answer to a question like that as each individual blog is not only different, it has different aims and expectations. If your writing a blog in order to make money from the blog, do you spend money to make money? I don’t know that I would. Organic SEO can often deliver a decent amount of traffic for free.
On the other hand, if your blog is a window to your main commercial website, then spending money on some form of advertising may prove financially beneficial.
The important factor in any campaign, even a blog marketing campaign, is the expected (and actual) return on investment (ROI). It is pointless spending money on an advertising campaign if you are not going to get that return. But then, what sort of return are you looking for?
I said I would not spend money to make money. That is not quite true. I would certainly not spend money on an Adsense campaign to bring traffic in if my only source of income was as an Adsense publisher. However if I was promoting a range of profitable affiliate links then the story may be different.
Likewise, if my intention is simply to gain new readers and new subscribers, I may decide that a paid blog campaign was worth the investment. If your blog is a window to your primary business, then is makes sense to promote it at every opportunity.
In that situation, your blog is one of your marketing tools. As such its primary focus is to draw as much traffic as possible and then funneling the buyers to your commercial site. Done effectively, you can really measure the ROI by measuring the number that arrive on your site, the number that get funnelled to your web site, and of course, the number of conversions.
Ultimately, whether you use paid blog marketing techniques or free organic strategies, marketing your blog is a necessity and a good blog marketing plan should have clear ROI expectations.
