Bloggasm

This is something that I’ve believed for years, that using programs like Blogads — which allow you to upload an ad without the assistance of a human being — is much more effective than advertising in a magazine or newspaper. You pay $30,000 for a full page ad in a glossy magazine and you’re lucky if a reader happens upon that page once. But with a blog advertisement, the ad appears every time the page is loaded, no matter what blog post or page you happen to be viewing. Every incoming reader, whether he’s coming in from Google or another outside source, sees the ad.

I’m apparently not the only one who thinks so: Blogs Find Favor as Buying Guides:

While the rise of blog readership in recent years is no secret, the power of blogs to influence what people buy is less established. But as a recent study reveals, that power is significant — so much that a majority of blog readers say blogs are useful when they make purchases.

The study, which polled 2,210 people and was released this fall, found that the increase in blog readership from 2004 to 2008 was 300 percent; 47 percent of online consumers now read blogs.

Half of blog readers said blogs were useful when they were considering what purchases to make, and more than half of that group said they looked at a blog just when they were about to buy something.