Creating Blogs for Local Small Businesses & Affiliate Marketing

Idea: Create Blogs for Local Small Businesses & Affiliate Marketing

OK the latest project that I have been working on is to create a blog for local small businesses that I can also use to do affiliate marketing.

I think this is a good idea and that many beginning affiliate marketers could do the same thing. This idea will take advantage of several trends that are going on in the world at large.

Trend One: Local Marketing The trend to do marketing locally, also referred to as localized on line advertising. It is where businesses are contacting or presenting ads only to consumers who live within certain regions. Content relevance takes on a new level of meaning with local marketing.

Trend Two: Publishing for Local Areas Publishers that use the search business model are finding local marketing to be a valuable paid search advertisement tool. These publishers can tell the search engines to serve their advertisements only when a search is associated with a particular region, state, city, or even zip code. The more precise targeting results in lower costs and higher returns for search publishers. For example, publishers marketing plumbers campaigns can exclude any areas out side the service area of the plumber, ensuring that their search advertisement budget is allocated in the most efficient manner possible.

All the big search engines are trying to get into Local Search. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all have local search sections. They are even using technologies that deliver local searches rather you ask for them or not. They understand that you really are looking for things that are close to you. For example, I live in San Diego, and I entered plumber into Google. I noticed that the top listed plumbers were San Diego based plumbers. It seems that Google is so smart that it knows where I am at without me telling it.

Although it is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about in this post, I believe that Google knows where I am at based on my IP address. Cool.

Well this got me to thinking about the small businesses in my area. And I thought about how many of them could benefit from having a blog. And how if I built it for them I could use the blogs as a platform for affiliate marketing and the small business could use the blog to serve their local customers.

So I created a blog for a friend of mine who is a plumber, that is why I was searching for plumbers in the first place.

You can check the blog that I created here; MiniRooterSD. My idea with putting together this blog for my friend was that he could use it to communicate with his customers. You can note a couple of features that I built into this blog.

1. I highlight one of the services that he provides. We use Water Jets. In this post I show a diagram of how water jets work. Any small business could do a post for each service that they provide to help better describe what it is they do.

2. I provide him a post titled "Frequently Asked Plumbing Questions". As his customers ask him questions he can answer them and interact with them, there by communicating with future customers as well. And he as able to communicate his expertise as a plumber in this post. I will update this post for him as more customers questions come in.

Now you may be wondering what this has to do with affiliate marketing, well I think that as my friend gives out his business card that has the URL of this blog to his customers, the blog will get more traffic and as people visit the blog they will may click on some of the other affiliate links that I have provided.

This post is just one example of what an affiliate marketer could do to create blogs for the businesses in their local area. I am using the cheapest and most available tools here just to show you how it could be done, but you could use much better tools to create a more polished final product.

As Local On Line Marketing evolves, it will become more of an embedded part of existing marketing vehicles, but there is a great deal of opportunity for early adopters right now!

I would be interested in hearing how some other affiliate marketers out there think they can use this. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.