Blog marketing is touted today as a new way of reaching out new clients and creating new markets.
Blogs are websites where the site owners and other bloggers post their diary entries, their thoughts, comments on each other's ideas and even promote a positive brand image, particularly if the brand is owned by the site owner.
Blogs are no replacement to traditional media but to complement the other modes of advertising. They promote their brand in one medium while using another because they realize that all the media work better, if they're supported by other media.
Most marketers start building a community of bloggers to address brand issues, reach new markets while sustaining dialogue with present and loyal users. A case example is the South African company Stormhoek Winery. Stormhoek created a blog in stormhoek.com and through it educated it's customers on wine freshness, offered them free wine tasting, encouraged it's bloggers to write the merits of grapes, etc. From an initial blog community of 85 bloggers, the webs rose to more than 200,000 hits a month.
