Business Blogs: PR Tool or Marketing Tool?

While working on a PR and marketing plan recently, the question came up: are blogs more of a PR tool or a marketing medium? Seems like an interesting question, yet there has been surprisingly little written about it. "Blog marketing" outscores "blog PR" on a Google search by a margin of about five to two, and you'll find four times as many books about blog marketing at Amazon as you will about blog PR.

However, Online-PR.com (which has a very nice list of blog directories and aggregators, by the way) lists about three times as many blogs devoted to PR as focused on marketing. InternetNews predicted a couple of years ago that blogging would make corporate PR and marketing obsolete, but clearly that hasn't happened yet.
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My own conclusion is that blogs are primarily a PR tool. A well-written blog raises awareness and visibility, and establishes credibility -- all of which are PR objectives. Blogs are not particularly strong at direct response; they rarely excel at marketing functions like selling or generating leads directly. Thinking of your blog as a component of your overall PR strategy will help establish the right direction, and the right expectations for results.

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Terms: business blogs, blog marketing, blog PR, blogs are a PR tool, online-pr.com, Top Rank SEO blog

The Internet marketing advertising portal: WebMarketCentral.com

Contact Mike Bannan: mike@digitalrdm.com

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