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Indirect marketing is gaining in popularity, especially online. Savvy marketers have been doing it for years - even before the advent of the Internet. But with the rise in popularity of blogs you can actually engage indirect marketing to a highly effective marketing capacity. Here’s how:

Pick a topic that you care about. It can be a hobby or a social service. In fact, indirect marketing works great as a community service approach.

Let’s say you have a charity you support. Start a blog that promotes the charity. We at Blog Content Provider have several of our own:

• Missing Children
• Runaway Teens
• Most Wanted Newspaper

By focusing your efforts on a charitable cause you can attract people to your charity blog to learn more about your good cause. You can support a non-profit organization that does charity work through that blog or provide information about the cause. Somewhere on your blog, however, you should have a link back to your corporate website as a sponsor.

Humor blogs are also good for this kind of indirect marketing. Start a joke blog or a humor site that draws in people for a short laugh or entertainment and use it to drive traffic back to your corporate site.

Got a hobby? Write about your hobby and use your hobby blog to drive traffic back to your business blog.

There is more than way to use indirect marketing to drive traffic back to your website. But I do know it works. Try it with your very own indirect marketing blog.

Matt Cutts has offered advice on commercial blogging in at least a couple of places. While I’m not a disciple of Matt (and I don’t necessarily recommend that anyone else be either), he does offer some good advice in this area. Consider:

• Don’t make hard promises
• Don’t trash talk the competition
• Don’t post when you’re angry
• When just starting out, proceed with caution
• Learn what matters and what doesn’t
• Don’t clam up over mistakes

This is all very good advice. And now, for the elaboration:

No hard promises - The future is bright. We know that. You’re improving, you’ve got great plans, but you can’t predict the future. An earthquake could shatter your building and you could lose all your research. Executives may decide to change midstream. Changes in the business climate could cause your company to modify plans. There’s nothing wrong with making tentative statements like “We plan to …” and “This should …” When in doubt, don’t make hard-and-fast statements that customers, suppliers, and partners will come to rely on. They will make decisions based on what you say publicly.

Keep the trash talk out of it - If your brand can’t stand on its own then you’re in trouble. No need to tear down the competition. But honest and fair comparisons are OK.

Don’t post when you’re angry - Sometimes people take cheap shots or get their facts wrong. If you feel you need to respond publicly to a situation, don’t do it when you’re angry. Let the anger subside. Or write the post you want to write and don’t post it. Let it sit for 24 hours then take another look at it.

Ramp up slowly. The best time, it seems, to make a big mistake is when you first start out. If blogging is new to you, don’t jump in with the controversial stuff first. Go into it slowly and work your way up to the hard stuff. Establish your voice and make sure your communications won’t be misunderstood.

Learn what matters. Some things are so trivial you’ll wonder later why you thought it mattered. Figure it out before you make a fool of yourself.

Allow for mistakes. You’re only human. Even if you’re the CEO of a multi-national corporation, you still have blood and bones. Mistakes happen. Don’t let it get to you. Overcome them gracefully.

Matt Cutts got it right on this one. This is sage advice that is applicable to small company bloggers as well as corporate bloggers. Even ghostwriters like us.

Blogging is a unique content mechanism. In many ways it is an individualist enterprise, but there are some consistencies between blogging techniques. Even then, within all those consistencies, there’s really no right way and wrong way. There are multiple right ways and a variety of ineffective ways to go about blogging.

If you know your topic well - and you should - you can write a 300 word blog post in 10 or 15 minutes. It’s off-the-top-of-your-head writing. But you probably don’t want to write every blog post that way. Sometimes you want to spend a little extra time composing a great blog post that will serve as good link bait and great reading for your regular readers as well as serve as a good hook for your new readers. How long should that blog post be?

I think most successful bloggers will tell you that a blog post shouldn’t be too long. You certainly don’t want to write 5,000 word blog posts every day. Occasionally is OK, but not every day.

If you spend more than an hour writing your blog posts every day then you are probably spending too much time on your blog. But if you write 15-minute blog posts every day then you are probably not spending enough time. Most of your posts can be the shorter, 300-word, 15-minute posts and you can get away with it. But you want some variety so that you don’t get into a routine that bores you and causes you to lose interest. You also don’t want your readers to lose interest and go away. So every now and then you should probably spend a little extra time writing that longer blog post just to spice things up a bit.

I love what Matt McGee has to say on his hyperlocal blog.

I’m a big believer that blogs are about as powerful an SEO tool as you’ll find right now, so our plan began with a blog.

We agree. That’s why we always recommend a blog to our clients who want to speed up their search engine rankings. Matt McGee is using a hyperlocal blog to help his wife in her real estate business. They’ve been doing it since December 2006. We’ve been doing it since April of that year and have had great success in helping real estate agents reach local home buyers and sellers. Local blogging is here to stay and business who want to reach a wider audience in a small geographical area will need to start a blog. This will be the way to communicate with potential customers in the next 3-5 years.

Matt also says this about obtaining business from his wife’s blogs:

blogging has led directly to at least three clients and closings that we know of, and indirectly to several others. Those commissions mean the blog is a success in the only metric that counts: Revenue created.

That’s a great point. You can get thousands of links and hundreds of top rankings for your keywords, but if you aren’t making money from your efforts then something is amiss. If you aren’t cranking out the revenue, however, it may not be your blog’s fault. We use blogging as a traffic driving tool. SEO, yes, but we also expect to drive targeted traffic to our clients’ blogs and we’ve done that well since the summer of 2006. We lost one real estate client who said that after one month of blogging she had more traffic to her static website than she’d ever had before. But she wasn’t closing any sales. That clearly is an issue with your static website or the agent’s own ability to close sales. The blog is doing its job.

On one final note, here’s Matt again:

There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO success. Commitment and patience are foundational elements of longterm online success, and we’d have to slog through the tough work like everyone else.

There’s no need to be impatient. Your blog will work for you, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Learn what is important and measure the important stuff. If inbound links are important then build inbound links. If traffic is important than pay attention to your traffic numbers. Set specific goals for your blog and manage your blog toward those goals.

Every now and then I see someone giving the advice to start a blog and use the blog as a business website to attract new business. In essence, the blog is touted as a good business model. But is it?

I generally say that if you are planning to go in business then you shouldn’t start a blog and use that as your primary website. There are several reasons for this, the chief of which blogs make great marketing tools but rarely succeed as standalone business ventures.

There are a few, however, that work quite well as businesses. If you are going to make blogging your chief business interest then you need to have a plan and that plan includes a monetization plan. How will your blog make money? On the whole, however, most businesses would do better to use the blog as a marketing tool to drive traffic to another website. But there is one way you can start with a blog and build a static website later and be very successful.

In this model, you use your blog as an Elijah, a forerunner to your website. If you know that you are going to build a website to cover a particular niche, don’t build the website right away. Instead, put a blog on that domain name and start blogging to it every day with rich, keyword-focused content. After you have achieved respectable first page rankings for the key phrase that you are trying to capture you can then build your static website right there on that domain name. But don’t ditch the blog.

Move the blog to a folder on that site and keep blogging every day, but build your static website on the domain name itself. You’ll get all the traffic and SEO benefits that you’ve already built into the blog and you can keep the blog active to continue building fresh daily content.

Everyone, it seems, wants to make money from their blog, but blogging isn’t necessarily all about money. A blog can also be used for marketing purposes, to drive traffic and improve your SEO, which ultimately is about improving your search position for your important keywords.

When you monetize a blog through advertising - whether display, PPC, CPM, text links, or another model - you are really attempting to get people to click on those ads. You write content that encourages that. Some people use a mediocre or lousy content strategy. In other words, they purposely downplay their content so that visitors click the ads. It works for some of them, but you don’t want to do that on your business blog.

For your company blog, you really want to develop a relationship with the people who will do business with you. You want traffic and SEO benefits. By focusing on keyword-rich content that is valuable to human readers, you will increase your brand positioning as well as your company image, and that’s what really counts.

Andy Beal recently appeared on ABC News to promote his new book about reputation management. One of the things that he suggests for reputation management is a blog. We couldn’t agree more.

In fact, a blog is one of the most important reputation management tools you can have. The daily posts will keep your name in front of search engines and humans for a long time. Every blog post is counted as a separate web page in the search engines and since search engines index web pages, not websites, every time you post a new blog post you are essentially adding one more page to the search engines’ indexes. That’s one more hurdle for those trying to destroy your reputation.

The best reputation management is a pre-emptive strike. If you spend a little bit of time every day doing something online that will get your name and/or company name in the search engines then that will go a long way to combating negative information submitted by someone else. There is no guarantee, of course, that negative information won’t rise to the top, but you can reduce the chances of that happening by having your very own blog. In fact, we recommend a personal blog as well as a company blog. Both can go a long way to combating negative, reputation-damaging information online.

While Blog Content Provider paved the way into business blog ghostwriting, there are other services up and coming. We welcome them. It keeps us on our toes. But we’ve also noticed that most of these companies charge more than we do. Recently, a competitor engaged in a spam tactic that I think you all should know about.

Trackbacking is a legitimate practice that involves linking to another blog and the post from which you link appears as a comment on that other blog. Examples of this practice abound. But there are ways to game trackbacking and scam unsuspecting bloggers into approving an illegitimate trackback that is nothing more than spam.

It happened this way for us: On our Mortgage and Real Estate Blog I recently found a trackback that needed an admin approval (I highly recommend that you set your blog settings to require approval before all comments go live). You should also visit every site by a commenter or trackbacker to ensure the site is good. If the site itself doesn’t meet your approval then don’t approve the comment or trackback. I always do this.

When I visited the trackbacking site by clicking on the URL provided, I perused the blog post of the company feigning a legitimate trackback. The problem was that there was no link in the blog post leading back to our blog. In other words, they programmed their blog software to make it appear as if they were trackbacking to our blog, but the link wasn’t there. It was hidden. That way, the search engines see it, but human visitors do not, cutting off all traffic from their blog to ours. If I’d approved the trackback then the relationship between their blog and ours would have been one sided. They would have benefited from our traffic, but we would not have benefited from theirs.

This is called cloaking. It’s a practice that all of the search engines frown upon. It’s also a widespread practice by devious webmasters who try to gain an advantage in ways that are unfair. If your blogging company engages in this practice then I highly recommend that you drop them immediately and use a company that engages in legitimate and search engine approved tactics.

This trackbacker operating under the veneer of legitimate practices was a blog ghostwriting competitor trying to target real estate agents with their services. Beware of these types of spamming operations. They will hurt your business more than help it.

Spammers used to just pick up your articles at article directories and slap them on a Blogspot blog with AdSense. Or they’d use WordPress and trackback to your blog in hopes that you’d approve the trackback and send traffic to click on their ads. Now they’re getting even more clever than that.

I recently found an article I wrote on a plain blog, no ads. The spammer included by author resource box with all links intact. So far, so good. But I noticed that right in the middle of the article, throughout the article, the spammer inserted nonrelevant sentences with nonrelevant links pointing to other web pages that contained their AdSense ads. How clever.

I’m sure this is in violation of Google AdSense guidelines. I know it’s in violation of article directory guidelines and search engine guidelines. If this happens to you, report the offending website to each search engine and to Google AdSense. It’s a small measure, but one that might go a long way to clean up unwanted spam.

Online marketing is about finding a niche and building on it. You could say harping on it. Blog Content Provider has been showing businesses how to capitalize on niches for over two years now. As many online marketers are talking about the increasing difficulty of marketing online, we’re talking about how increasingly easy it is becoming. It is easy - if you know how.

The problem with most companies is they don’t know how. Company after company come to us to start a blog only to find out that there is a power play between the management and the marketing department. The fact is, most company marketing departments are not successful at marketing their company’s website online. They may be great at traditional marketing, but online marketing isn’t traditional marketing.

Off line you can integrate all of your marketing efforts seamlessly under one department. Online, it is better to segregate your efforts into niches. A television campaign that highlights the benefits of doing business with your company can work wonders, but you are better off online targeting each division of your company to the target market that is interested in that doing business with that niche. If you market your company this way then you could end up with 50 or 100 blogs in addition to 50 or 100 separate websites - one for each division of your company. That OK. You’ll be much more effective that way.

You don’t have to set up all 50 of your websites and blogs in one day. Start with one. When you see the results you’ll be amazed and you’ll share your success story with other department heads. We know. We’ve seen it many times. I’m sure we’ll see it again.