Here on the SearchAnyway blog, lately, we've been talking a lot about using blogs for affiliate marketing purposes. After all, blogs are great for building contextual traffic. So even if you don't want to build and affiliate marketing blog, you can always install one somewhere on one of your other affiliate marketing portals, and use it to publish content that pertains to whatever affiliate marketing niche it is that you specialize in.

However, it's occurred to me that many of our affiliates aren't necessarily familiar with the basics of blogging, and since we haven't discussed it all that much around here in the past, I thougt I'd revisit some basics concepts over the coming weeks.

Something that's both a pro and con about blogging is that it's not journalism. This is a pro because writers don't have to conform to the same, dry style guidelines of objectivity and theinverted pyramid. Bloggers are free to be as impassioned and bias as they want, and they'll still be able to reap the SEO benefits because search engine don't care whether or not your content is fair and balanced.

The con is that, as a result, just because something is published on a blog, that doesn't mean that it's credible. As Shoemoney states in his disclosure:

You should assume I am no better then you are and your opinion has just as much weight as mine. You should question everything. You should come up with your own thoughts and opinions and not trust some stupid blogger.

In other words, blogs are not the mainstream media, and just as a mainstream media could never get away with what a blogger can, any blogger that tried to write like a mainstream journalist would flounder.

A blogger must come off as human and organic in his or her writing. They must be a writer of the people user. They must share blog about information that their readers subscribers find both interesting and useful, and they need to blog about it in a tone that they'd use if they were teaching something to a close friend.

They can't afford to be either arrogant or esoteric. That is, of course, if they're actually writing for their audience and not just for their own self-satisfaction.