How did Pharaoh market his blog 4,000 years ago? Chances are he did it the same way you need to market yours today.

Well, there are a few differences. His blog was written in hieroglyphics on clay tablets, and instead of the internet his blog posts were distributed via a network of “runners” who would hand deliver the content to readers.

Otherwise his blog was pretty good. (Except when he talked about his cat – Katses the First.)

But on a serious note…

I keep seeing blog posts about the “revolutionary” new ideas on marketing your blog.

Here’s a fact you might want to digest: The same effective marketing techniques have been around and working for thousands of years.

The medium might be different, but the techniques are the same.

Many of the “leaders” in teaching blog marketing and monetization today come from the same background: They started a blog, depended on search engines and/or word of mouth to get their traffic, and monetized their blogs primarily through selling ads and affiliate products.

I call that “Passive Marketing” and it does work, but not just that well. Using passive marketing you may make as little as a fraction of a penny per visitor.

My background is in psychology and I have specifically studied and applied the psychology of marketing. While the marketing channels change over time (from newspaper to magazine to radio to television to computer bulletin boards to craigslist to search engines to social networking sites to ?) the basic methods are still the same:

1. Find a medium where you can reach your target market at a profit with your marketing message
2. Create an enticing “loss leader” (a free gift, a below wholesale price, etc.) to get people to give you their attention
3. Get contact information from those people
4. Contact those people regularly with other offers they will be interested in
5. Contact those who buy with higher priced offers in the same target market

Let’s apply this rule to a specific product most blog owners seem to want to sell today: Blog advertising.

Find a medium where you can reach your target market at a profit with your marketing message

I want to find people who are ALREADY spending money advertising on blogs. The best way to do this is to go to other blogs in my market and click on their ads, making a note of the websites that are already buying ads.

Then I can contact them either via phone or email with my marketing message.

Create an enticing “loss leader” (a free gift, a below wholesale price, etc.) to get people to give you their attention

My loss leader: Free Advertising. I will offer each advertisor one week or one month free advertising on my site with no strings attached. If they decide after the first free period they want to continue, then they have to pay for additional advertising space.

(I would probably also create a viral report on buying blog advertising, but I won’t go into that here.)

Get contact information from those people

When they sign up for the free advertising I would make add their contact information to my automated list (I use Aweber for this service—so should you) so I can contact them again and again.

Contact those people regularly with other offers they will be interested in

I would follow up with them and offer additional advertising offers and options in the future.

Contact those who buy with higher priced offers in the same target market

Those who buy I would offer additional, higher priced, advertising offers: A six month agreement, a bigger banner, a personal recommendation solo ad, etc.

And that’s been being done—in one way or another—for thousands of years.

Art here.

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