Blogs are quickly becoming one of the best marketing tools that small businesses and even large corporations can use. Whether your business is online or offline you can use a blog to keep your customers up to date on the latest events and generally use a blog as a marketing and advertising tool for extra revenue.

Blogs enable direct interaction with customers and allow them to see what goes on behind the scenes as well as keep up to date with the latest news. Blogs are inexpensive to start and run, enabling you to use thousands of themes to change the look of your site at the click of a button.

Here are a 5 key reasons as to how blogging for your company can be a good thing:

• Direct communication between you and your clientel.
• Blogs are great for SEO, fresh content added daily will bring traffic.
• The more relevant the content the more opporunity for the niche to branch off into other areas which in turn creates more revenue..
• Comments allow direct feedback customers as well as potential clientel.
• Cost effective, low startup cost, high return.

Make sure to give your customers a reason to read your blog as well.  Have them directly interacting with you by using polls, questionnaires, giveaways and contests, and you will see a surge in the growth of your company as well as some added side revenue from your blog.

Cloaking Affiliate Links

When you come across an affiliate link for the first time you don’t really know whats on the other end, and that your being sold some sort of product or service. Then as time goes by you start to become more and more aware of affiliate links and if your like me, you avoid them like the plague. The solution you may ask? Cloaking!

If you want to cloak your affiliates links its actually pretty easy. There’s numerous ways to do so, but if you are on a budget like me, then you wont want to spend out of pocket large amount of money. So I am gonna show you a uniquely simplistic way to hide your links, without using and backend coding.

Hide your Affiliate Links

Besides making your landing page a better sell , your surfers are way more susceptible   to click through and convert on affiliate link when they distincly think that its legit and totally unbiased. The trust is broken when the link ends up showing up as an affiliate link.

Which would you click through?
www.google.com/?ref=LorneFade2884 or www.google.com ?

You have no idea where that ref link points to, and the fact that it could be some NSFW content or something malicious is hardly worth your suspicion.

Cloak Them!

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/targeturl” target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.displaythisname.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>Your Site</a>
<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/1.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″/>

So just take the code above, fill in your affiliate link and then fill in the link you would like to show your users, they wont know the difference. There are other methods including javascript redirects and the like, however for the time it takes I feel that this method is an absolute must for any webmaster who was unaware.

One of the first decisions to make when setting up an affiliate marketing website is whether to make it in the format of a blog or not. There are definitely pros and cons to this decision:

Pros:

1. Search engines like blogs because they are updated often. I had a niche blog which was found by MSN and was on the first page of their results within days!
2. There are many directories of blogs that you can submit to, to have your blog found.
3. You can easily set up a “feed” for your blog, and people can subscribe to it. You can also subscribe to your own feeds on My Yahoo, My Msn, and Personalized Google Homepage. Doing this seems to help the search engines to find your blog.
4. Bloggers like to comment on each other’s blogs. You can get traffic this way too.
5. The blogging software is a Content Management System (CMS). It makes it very easy to manage your site. Once you have your template set up the way you want it, it is easy to add content. And when you change your template, the changes automatically apply to all your pages. This is the thing I like the best! I have found this to be a huge help.

Cons:

1. You can get so caught up in posting that you lose track of why you are doing your site. (Not to post every day, but to sell affiliate products.) This is what happened to me with my first site, until I got back on track.
2. A blog looks different than a website and some new users of the internet are not used to blogs. You can get around this by deleting those parts of the template that you don’t want (such as the blogroll, the archives, even the dates).
3. If you want to use software such as Site Build It to make creating your website easier, it will not be a blog. But they do give you other ways to drive traffic to your site, so I don’t think this would be a problem.

Conclusion: There is no one way that is right for everyone. You can have a great affiliate website either way. I got started with blogs because it seemed so easy. And so far, I have been happy with that approach. But you should do whatever works for you.