Blogging is a concept that started in late 90s.  It used to be a way to comment on an existing webpage, an opportunity for visitors and readers to react or voice out their opinions on the page.  What started as a single-sentence commentary has evolved into pages of personal take on just about anything and everything under the sun.  As it continues to move forward, online advertising has tapped into the blogs potential.  Here are 5 reasons why you should use blogging as an Internet marketing tool.

1. Blogging is simple. The simplest way to get your piece on the net is through blogging.  No skills are necessary… an average adult can read and type, or at least click a mouse.  It’s like having a virtual piece of paper and you just write your ideas, experiences, new products, and hope that the truth behind your articles comes out and entices your reader to also buy your product.  If you have a PC and an Internet connection (who doesn’t these days?) then you can blog and advertise.
2. Blogging is authentic. In this day and age of advertising, we are saturated by product promotion and tend to question everything that is thrown in our face. In blogs, people tell their stories (pitch their products) as more of a real life experience, giving the pitch more credibility. Reading a blog post about first-hand user experience with a producr is nearly as good as you calling up your best friend to tell them about the latest greatest gadget you just found. People are more likely to buy a tried and tested product.
3. Blogging is free. Although I prefer self-hosted blog accounts with WordPress installed, I do still use a couple of free blogs. Most of the free sites don’t consider blog as a mainstream advertising medium, so they continue to allow free accounts. A word of warning… Some of the free blogging services are starting to inspect blogs more closely and close the ones that are just pitching products. You must provide good free content if you want to keep them around. With all of that said, any time you can get free website space; go for it. You will have more flexibility and probably make more money with a self-hosted blog, though.
4. Blogging builds credibility in your niche. As you get deeper and deeper into writing about your particular niche, your readers will come to realize that they can depend on you for their own information needs. As such, you become an expert in your niche. As an expert, more bloggers link to your posts. This al drives more traffic to your site through referrals and search engines. Your ad rates will increase and you will make more money from your blog.
5. Blogging builds your market. Unless you are already a celebrity, chances are the only ones that will be reading a new blog are your friends and family. Sure they may send some of their friends your way, but you shouldn’t depend on them to build your readerships base. Here are a few ways to build your market through your blog:

• Join a blog network. Joining a network not only allows you to interact with other bloggers, but will also get you a few curious readers who will then recommend your site to others. Many, like Yahoo’s MyBlogLog service allow you to create user groups for your blogs. Usually if you make a contact and join one of their groups, they’ll reciprocate and join yours.
• Comment on other peoples blogs in your niche. This will give you backlinks to your site that will increase your search engine rankings. If the comment makes a good point, you might even pick up a few readers who have read your comment. The blog owner may also take a look at your page and link to or comment on some of your posts.
• Understand your readers. Get to know what information they want to read about. WordPress has a poll plug-in that you can add to your blog and ask your readers what they think. Tweet about the poll on twitter. People like to express their opinions and you will pick up a few new readers fro them voting on the poll and when they come back in s few days or hours to check the results. Knowing what the reader wants will help you to generate more useful content and make the likelyhood of them sharing your site with others much higher.
• Add a social bookmarking bar to all of your posts. WordPress has many options for this. If the option is there, they are more likely to share a post than if it wasn’t there. They may think about it and not get around to it when they log into Digg, or Facebook or whatever. If the link is right there in front of them it makes it easy for them to share it.
• Use a subscription. Add a form to where your readers can subscribe to your blog. If you don’t want to maintain a mailing list, at least provide a link to the RSS feed where they can get notifications when a new post is up. WordPress automatically pings your post, so if someone has your RSS feed in their bookmarks the post will be available to them within minutes (sometimes seconds) of you publishing it.

Using your blog as a tool for internet marketing is really a no brainer. Any time that you can get more eyes to read what you have to say about your niche market is a good thing. It builds credibility and makes it all that much easier to sell them on your product or service at a later time.