It is evident that this new wave of advanced marketing strategies using blogs and content writing has been the new resort of most companies in the world of business today. These are the new elements that have helped businesses evolve into better managed companies aimed at attaining set goals.

Marketing is the life stream of any business entity and all marketing people will exhaust all means to use any advanced and new ways of making marketing strategies work. Hence, the new age of marketing has turned to these technology driven gifts called blogging and content writing and have had headway in doing so as we can see today.

In a time where marketing automation is a big focus, it’s important not to forget that your website is, “...the place that brings everything together in a unified place…” This is a very important point. Think about the times you’ve received marketing communications from a company, gone to their website, and been confused because what you encountered there was nothing related to their marketing communication. Consistency of story is hugely important to having your content drive action. – New Rules of Marketing & PR

[tags]blogging, blog marketing, marketing practices, marketing strategies, advertising, promotions[/tags]

Whoever said blogs can’t be big business is set to be proven wrong by trends with blog and content networks these days. Frank Barnako of Marketwatch reports that Federated Media is posting revenues of $1 million per month.

In a little noticed pre-holiday posting, John Battelle said Federated Media Publishing’s stable of 100 Web sites and blogs had a great ‘06. “I won’t gloat, but … we beat my year’s estimated revenues by nearly 30%,” he wrote on Searchblog. He added, the revenue run rate is now $1 million a month.

Of course, it helps that Federated Media has in its roll several of the most popular blogs and new-media related sites today, such as DIGG, Gaping Void, BoingBoing and TechCrunch. Also, FM is more of a clearinghouse that connects independent authors with advertisers, rather than being a network that manages its own sites or a commune that helps with linkages among independent sites.

We hear FM is opening its doors to more independent authors soon. If you think you (and your blog) has what it takes to be part of FM, then it might be worth the try.

When the Washington Post’s sponsored blogroll appears on the Washington Post’s homepage, Creative Weblogging’s blogs will be there:

The Washington Post website says it is a Beta program. When last I looked, three entities were listed as Beta partners, of which Creative Weblogging is one. The other two are All Business and Bootsnall.com.

For Creative Weblogging it means the potential to give expanded visibility to the 80+ talented bloggers who are part of the Creative Weblogging network from 16 countries around the world.

You can read more about this new advertising program over at The Blog Herald.

The earlier debate over revenue share v. pay/post or other payment methods continues today with a response from BizNicheMedia:

If the blog network succeeds, great, but on rev-share, your writers get most of the profits (did I read 75% over on that thread??). If the blog network fails, meh, who cares, the writers take all the losses.

Rev share, for a blog network owner, is like smoking Camel Filters. (Sorry, Jay)

When my network fails, I take ALL the losses. And if (when) it makes 200k a year, I take ALL the profits. (I = me and Mr. McIver)

Over at blogging.wurk.net, Barry Bell takes a look at revenue sharing and offers a few thoughts:

1) The revenue share model allows networks to grow, who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance.

If you’re planning on starting a blog network, the chances are that you don’t have buckets of cash to throw at writers. It’s also more likely than not that you’ll have a hard time getting angel or VC money behind you, because the pure content business has always been a risky investment – especially when you’re driving a start-up content business. So therefore, for the first 6-12 months – while you’re building up an attractive platform for advertisers, you’re not going to be able to pay your writers in the traditional manner.

I have to agree with Barry on this issue. By and far, I believe revenue sharing to be a success. I know we’re happy with this approach, and it appears that b5media (who is also doing revenue sharing) is also happy with this approach.

Granted that the two largest blog networks, Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc., are using pay/post or other methods rather than revenue sharing. But most blog networks don’t have the upfront capital to be able to do that – and I for one am not convinced that pay per post is the way to go.

Gawker Media has gone mobile:

Gawker and Defamer proudly present the next step in content delivery evolution: Gawker and Defamer daily text alerts.

Subscribe today for a daily injection of pure, unfiltered gossip, sent directly to your mobile phones and free of the traditional time-wasting trappings like pictures and full sentences. When your marriage proposal is interrupted by a poorly timed anecdote about Kiefer Sutherland acting drunk, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them!

This is another method that puts Gawker far ahead of the pack – is any other blog network using mobile technology?

Many covered an apparant outage on the Yahoo Publisher Network yesterday, Jensense was one of the first to break the story:

The first news of YPN downtime came on Digital Point at 11:20 PM PST Thursday night. WebmasterWorld reported it an hour later. Members on both forums discussed seeing only blank spaces across all YPN sites (including the YPN ads here).

Outage lasted nearly six hours, with some users beginning to report seeing YPN on a limited number of sites at about 5pm PST. However, the ads were soon back to showing white space on all sites for another couple of hours, when ads began to slowly return to sites.

Total downtime was about 12 hours, which will make a significant dent in publisher’s earnings for the day. And as can be expected, some publishers switched out YPN for AdSense.

Performancing looks at the relationship between blog themes and profitability:

We’ve got 3 ad units and 1 link unit available for use per page. Is it best to utilize them all, or will that be ad overload and cause you to lose viewship? And which ad units work best for you guys? Have you found link units to be effective, as well?

Which blogs that you’ve come across do you think have the best layouts for maximizing their adsense income?

Which of the 615+ wordpress themes that are out there are best suited for both SEO purposes, easy to read for the viewer, and maximized revenue (assuming that you insert your adsense code into the themes, of course). (check out the wordpress theme viewer to see a sizeable number of them demo’d). Which of those themes can be best monetized?

Chitika has released new reports:

Want to know which of your eMiniMalls units are the most effective and generating the most revenue for you? Check out our new updated affiliate reporting and account management system with easy to use tab based menu options and custom reports.

You can now access and view aggregate stats across various channels for any period: ‘last week’, ‘this month’, ‘last month’, or for any select dates.

Chartreuse takes a look at Girl-Spoke and has some thoughts on monetizing their network:

So I was looking over Spoke-Media’s sites yesterday for my Save This Network feature and I was impressed. They get it. It’s not the kind of sites I would visit or hang around but that’s the point.

If you have never visited, it’s 4 sites which feel like it’s run by drunken women. It’s like a private party (except for some cat named CJ who whines like he’s a belongs on The View, but those types go to parties,too).

Almost everything about the sites are perfect, in my eyes. It’s focused. Has features to keep you coming back (horospoke, indeed!) and has it’s targeted audience. It’s not dull (by a long shot) and they know their Brand.

But they seem to have a problem that most new networks are having. They have not figured out yet how to monitize their content. It got me so frustrated in fact seeing the affiliate ads that I decided to once and for all tell everyone within the sound of this keyboard how to really make money. This may end up being kinda long (since it’s important) so grab some Java, sit your ass down and take notes.

Chartreuse has had some great posts lately – check out their blog, it’s worth reading.