Move over ezine advertising..and make room for the new tool in town - Blog Advertising! Haven't heard of blogs? Then you need to get yourself in gear and inform yourself on the next big craze. Blog advertising is a very cheap and very effective way to reach your target audiences. Read my article today to find out why and more ...

If you haven't yet heard the word "blog" then you have some serious catching up to do because they are the hottest and most talked about item on the web this year.

Advertisers, including Paramount Pictures, The Wall Street Journal, and the Gap, are successfully reaching niche audiences for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. As a result, a handful of bloggers are earning six-figure incomes from their blogs. But what exactly is a blog, and how can you take advantage of this widely untapped advertising venue? That's my aim for this article. Let's dig a litte deeper ....

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify and accelerate the publishing process.

Blogs are alternatively called web logs or weblogs. However, "blog" seems less likely to cause confusion, as "web log" can also mean a server's log files.

With click-through rates in traditional online advertising dropping, inexpensive blog click-throughs are as high as 5%. Blogs provide advertisers an excellent opportunity to reach a devoted audience niche for as little as $10 a week. Why blogs are good media outlets:

Most blogs have dynamic keywords and are updated daily by either the administrator of the web log or his/her members. This means, a blogger receives more targeted SE visitors and more frequently then webmasters of static html sites.

Another advantage of advertising on blogs as opposed to Web sites is that readers tend to be extremely interested in the topic and very attached to the blogger. You can't ask for a better community of users to be in front of.

Recently, BlogAds conducted a web survey of 17,000 of their readers to find out what type of people are actually surfing blogs. The results? Sixty percent of the Blogads respondents said they are more than 30 years old, and almost 40 percent reported they have a household income of more than $90,000. Perhaps most importantly to advertisers, half of those who took the Blogads survey said that over the last six months they spent more than $50 online for books and more than $500 for plane tickets; 25 percent spent between $100-$500 on electronics via the Web.

Conclusion: Clearly, no company, organization or association can afford to ignore blogs any longer. Early adopters have taken the lead, and blogs are finally entering corporate consciousness.