Will sponsored blog posts, tweets work for your brand?

Starting a business is hard work - least of all because there's just so much competition out there that's speaking to your audience. Will your message be heard? Is your offering worth it? Are you saying something new? Are you even speaking to the right people?

Aaarrrrgh!

A powerful tool

There is a powerful new tool available, which will add another rung on your ladder of lead generation. While your sales guys are cold-calling, your CRM person is buying cappuccinos for your good prospects and lunching with your better prospects, you could be putting your brand and your message in front of the eyes of your ideal target audience to generate more leads. And it's not like you'll have to spend the equivalent of your annual net profits on a double-page spread and a billboard either.

The concept and value of paid blog posts and paid tweeting are going to explode. Soon. Bloggers and Twitter influencers, specifically in South Africa, are lining up in anticipation of the penny dropping for small (and large) businesses. So I'd just like to expound on how you could leverage these experienced bloggers and tweeters and the kinds of opportunities they'll provide for improving your lead generation.

Who are bloggers and tweeters?

Bloggers and tweeters are the content gods of the online universe. They are expert audience-builders who not only get their regulars to return and devour their content and Tweets, but enlist those regulars to share and retweet their content to their circles of influence.

They know what captures the interests of their audience and they give their readers more of what they want - enticing them to return time and again to the blogs and Twitter profiles they've come to respect, appreciate, enjoy, and share. They are essentially the custodians of online communities made up of rapt target audiences that will consume and share your message if it's spread by the right person.

Why you need bloggers and Twitter influencers

Their blogs get thousands of new hits per day and their tweets get seen and retweeted to audiences of eager, curious, hungry pairs of eyes searching for more value online.

Wouldn't you want your brand and your message displayed proudly to those pairs of eyes? This kind of exposure is gold to any small business wanting to get their (your) brand out there.

The price of sponsored PR

For such targeted exposure, you'll pay a relatively small amount to capitalise off the hard work that bloggers and Twitter influencers have had to put into building their specialised audiences. The cost of blog and tweet sponsorship is scaled according to how many daily hits the blogger gets or how influential the tweeter is. You get to pick who you want to promote your message or campaign to whom. It's an affordable and effective online PR tool.

Who's doing it?

This is still a very new bandwagon in South Africa, but when companies like myScoop (once a blog aggregator, now something a little different) get to prove how effective sponsored blogging and tweeting can be, everyone in the digital marketing space will jump on it.

As a (I'll admit, intermittent) blogger, I'd love to get paid for posting someone else's message, and I'll trust that my audience knows what to do with it and supports my decision to get paid for blogging. If you as a small business owner can see the value bloggers and other talented audience builders can bring to you, surely you can pay forward the kind of value that means something to them. Cha-ching, much?

As a small business owner, would you buy into this kind of online PR?