Before you can begin to define blog advertising it is important to establish what a blog is. A blog is a web log or web diary. Or at least that is how it started. But blogging has evolved into something much more while there are still millions (or billions) of folks starting and operating traditional web logs.

A blog is a web site that is easy to start and maintain because blogging is about content and not the system that supports it which is what attracts many web novices to the format. Blogs make it easy to have a site up and running in minutes. However for many more experienced web users blogging is also a great content management system, a great search engine optimization tool and an easy way to share information with a targeted audience.

In simplest terms, a blog is a web site that is actually a system of connected pages (or rather posts) that are organized by date with the most recent post presented first. So now that you understand what a blog is we can discuss the definition for blog advertising.

Blog advertising is as simple as it sounds. It is the advertising connected with a blog. Almost since the inception of blogging there has been some form of advertising involved. Banners and text ads have long been run in the top or heading of the blog, along the sides in sidebars, and along the bottom in footers. Then as the text link advertising industry began to pick up bloggers discovered they could sell text links on their blogs. Today, the hot topic in blog advertising is post sponsorship. This means that a blogger will include a link and often targeted key words and text within a post for an advertiser. A sponsored post will sometimes be written specifically for an advertiser and centered around specific key words and phrases. Some sponsored blog posts are reviews of a web site or product. Other sponsored blog posts are straight-forward blog posts that follow the traditional content and format of the blog but give a brief sponsorship mention.

Blogging is certainly not new and blog advertising is not new, but recent developments in the field have made it a hot topic of interest in the internet marketing community.