What is the blogosphere, really? It's a place where anyone—man,
woman, child, or automated feed scraper—can slap up templates or
build a site of their own and update it with useful(?) information or
tales of their weekly shopping trips to their hearts content.



It's both a powerful tool utilized by businesses and websites on a daily
(or more often) basis and a running personal diary put up online for
all to see.

The blogosphere is filled with experts and novices, and
people who think they are experts who are really novices. It's a
mixed-bag of content and expertise, or lack thereof. It's a
community experience that knows no real bounds. Or boundaries.

As such, blogs can be a boon or a bust to your affiliate program.
Nevertheless, they are being touted as the fastest, easiest, most
simplistic way to promote affiliate products and generate sales.
But are they? Let's explore both sides of this issue.

The up-side. Let's take a look at what we've got; blogging is
• Easy to get started

• Cheap (or even free) to get started

• An easy place to put up relevant information that can really
have value for your readers

• A place where you can utilize the community aspects such as
commenting to hold virtual conversations with your readers

• A place where you can potentially build long-term
relationships with your readers, which in turn can boost
return sales and add to the lifetime value of that customer

• A place where you can feature, in detail and in depth, any
singular product you want

• A simple way to update content to get on the good side of
search engines

That's quite a list of benefits in the argument for blogging.
Truthfully, blogging is—or can be, has the potential to be—all of
these things and probably more.

A blog can be a very good way to sell an affiliate product. But there are a lot of other things that blogs are, too, and many of these qualities do not fit into the grander scheme of affiliate websites. So before you decide
whether to blog or not, let's looks at the flip side of the
coin.

The Disadvantages Of Blogging

Many of the very things that make blogging a 'natural' choice for
affiliate promotions are what make blogging the wrong way to
effectively market as an affiliate.

First of all, let's take on the very blogosphere itself. It's a crowded
place. It is true that the blogosphere is filled with a variety of
interests, and holds something for everyone, but in the midst of all
that interest, it's increasingly hard to be found.


Even the best, most prolific, and most dedicated bloggers take months and years to build a solid following. A blog is absolutely not the place to go
for instant traffic.

The community aspect of blogging can be great, but couldn't it also
be a bust? All that commenting and free-for-all outside
commentary might work against you and discredit you. And you
need to think about how valuable that following is. This will largely
depend on your spectrum of product offerings. If you have a
variety of products that a customer might want to come back for,
or an upgradeable product suite, staying in touch with buyers could
be a great thing.

If your product is more of a one-time-only
purchase, there's probably no recouping the time investment you
will incur.

Content refreshment is one of the biggest recognized benefits of
blogging. You can post quickly and easily everyday and thereby
please those search engines and hungry blog-followers with new
content. There's no denying that.

But you need to think this through—how much can you come up with to say about your products? Can you keep your products upfront on a blog? How
many times can you spin it? And most importantly, what happens
when your well of topics dries up? Those search engines and
readers will be waiting for more, and you'll be grasping for new
post ideas.

It's easy to get a blog started and keep it running for a few
months, but Big Shot kind of income demands that you construct a
more long-term plan. Theoretically a blog is a long-term prospect,
but without something new to say, one can only live so long.


We also need to tackle the issue of being able to feature multiple
products. This flies right in the face of the discussion we just had
in the last chapter, doesn't it? By doing that, you're dividing your
forces and taking the focus away from your top-seeded efforts.
You've created a marketplace of confusion, and you've made it
hard to figure out what the right—simple—solution is.


We also need to talk about blogs from a structural standpoint.
Unless you can build your own blog (and even if you can this is
tough…), blogs and templates do not allow for a high level of
flexibility.

There is a basic structure, and it is very hard to add the
buttons and features in the places you need them to be. Consider,
too, that sometimes the structure and design you've worked so
hard for may be impacted (rearranged) by the length and amount
of your postings.

Now it might sound like we're completely anti-blogging for affiliate
programs, but that's not exactly the case. Let's wrap this
discussion up by looking at how a blog might still be a useful tool.





To Sum it all Up…
Blogs are not horrible things. They are not the bane of the affiliate.
But there is too much about a blog that makes it unmanageable as
a sole selling agent for affiliate products.

To be clear, we are not entirely against blogging. There is a place
for those who enjoy it, and a usefulness that can certainly boost
affiliate sales. But that place is secondary to the structure we've
already outlined here. As are the sales that you will generate
though a blog.

The distance that you get from a blog, even given their many
benefits, is not worth the investment of time and effort; not from
the standpoint of you r primary selling tool. Rather, you would be
better off relegating a blog to a secondary feeder-source of traffic
and revenue.

It takes a lot of constant, dedicated work to be a blogger and to
maintain a blog consistently in the way that will net these benefits
for you.

Blogging is a lot of hard work—and it never ends, or your
income stream will. And plain and simply, that's just not what
being a Big Shot affiliate is about.

Being a Big Shot internet marketer is not about
working hard for your money, it's about working moderately hard
for a few weeks, and then riding the coattails of your success. It's
about minimum maintenance. And a blog is not that. Blogging is a
way to make some money as an affiliate, but it's not the Big Shot
way.

In summation, if you enjoy blogging go for it! But don't make it
the focus of your affiliate business plan.

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