A blog is never a be-all and end-all solution to sales and marketing.

Blogging is a great sales and marketing tool. It can also help establish a better environment for online marketing.

But, what about using a blog specifically as a lead generation tool?

Good news. It is not only possible but also a great tool for capturing leads.

A blog attracts traffic from organic search engines. It could increase traffic if used properly.

A blog is also a medium for conversation. When other bloggers link to other blog, they bring referral traffic.

It is not for hard selling though.

There are other medium that are best suited for moving a stranger (or some marketers call it suspect) to prospect, and accordingly from prospect to customer. Some examples of such tools are white papers, teleseminars, email marketing, RSS marketing, etc.

As visitors come to your blog, you quickly build trust by offering the right content in front of them.

Before they go, hook them with more information. If they raise their hand, you are starting a sales process.

Hint: A blog can include an opt-in email form or subscription to web feed.

Still, offering more information involves no hard selling at all. The mindset of the prospects remain open to more information. As the result, they are more receptive to your offerings.

Integrating other marketing tools to the process let you concentrate on the things that a blog can do best. Not only does readers are more likely to come back because they can find valuable information without feeling sold, but you also can reach them anytime you want to — until they decide to opt out.

It doesn’t take long time of research to realize that the methods used for blog scams are actually repetitive.

The systems are more or less the same. Just that a product is just a slight improvement upon the predecessors. This is understandable, especially if you study what makes blog scams possible and what make them scams.

The facts that people are searching information online and many untapped keywords are available mean as publishers we could fill in the demand.

Legitimate blogs carefully write useful content so browsers find something useful.

Scams fill that needs by generating as much content as possible to satisfy the demand. Chances are it is impossible to rank on very competitive keywords, so they target all keywords. Hopefully some of them will rank quite high on search engines that search users will click.

The holes in search engines make the pages rank in result pages.

So, in short, we should see very similar models between one scam to another. Just that the tools need to be slightly different to process the source of content like search engine results, free article directories or affiliate merchant datafeeds.

With that said, here are some common blog scams techniques:

Blog content generation tools

• Auto RSS feeds to blog posting. Source one or more RSS feeds and post each entry as standalone content on the new spam blog (splog). Not only they add no value to existing content but often they fail to credit the source.
• Auto keyword stuffing content. Get content from random places, including search engine results and stuff keywords into the content if necessary before posting to the blog.
• Datafeed processing tool. Process important data from affiliate merchant’s datafeed and post them as content to the blog, complete with the affiliate links.
• Free article directories scraper. Search article directories for free articles related to the topic you want to post.
• Private label content spinner. Private label content is the cheap way to get huge amount of content. Rather than manually rewrite the content, the author could use the tool to spin paragraphs, words and bits of contents to make them unique.

Inbound link tools

• Blog and ping. Ping as much services as possible. Some of the services will index the pages, which in turn are followed by search engines. Others will let real users find the post when searching for information. However, these tools usually focus on the benefit of getting strong link popularity instead of real visitors because people detect fishy content relatively fast.
• Tag and ping. Use tagging such as Technorati tags, and auto submission to social bookmarking sites.
• Auto reciprocal link request. It is surprising that people are actually linking to splogs, but it happens especially between splogs to boost each other link popularity.
• Auto site submission tools. Submit to directories and also sites that allow adding links.
• Blog comment and trackback spamming. Automatically post blog comments that link back to the blog. Some of the comment spam get into the blogs, for each which doesn’t include the nofollow attribute, it is a boot for their link popularity.

Other tools

• Auto blog creation tool. Create hundreds, if not thousands of blogs automatically from one interface.
• Keyword research tool. While not exactly a scam, they are used by black hat publishers who make money from AdSense arbitrage method, but directing traffic to spam sites/splogs.

I am sure there are many tools either publicly sold or privately created by many sploggers, but the lists above are very common. Some of the old versions are available for free.

Blog and ping tools, for example are less effective nowadays because blog search engines are getting smarter, but they are available for free now.

Really, if you understand how these tools work and instead take the time to write your own content, network with other bloggers to gain links, post comments to other blogs, you are going to get some real exposure and build a legitimate blog. The laziness and automation part are what make them destructive for long term business.

The line that separates between a blog scam and legitimate blog model is often very thin.

In fact, some techniques used by blog scams take advantages of the benefits of blogging. The problem is, often they are used in ways that are destructive.

For example, “blog and ping” is a great tool to notify blog search engines about new entries or changes on your blog. Used properly, it tracks every single conversation that is currently happening on the blogosphere.

Aggressive blog and ping with spammy content turns the services into something less useful because of the volume of spam. It pollutes the blogosphere.

Some site generation tools claim to be legitimate and concentrate on building solid content based on sophisticated methods. Although the content generated are based on good information, still they lack personality and more or less repetition of the same content.

The content is good, but the auto-generation feature damages the quality. Who need repetitive information anyway?

Another technique utilizes mass submission tool for social bookmarking sites. This tool defeats the entire purpose of social bookmarking which is collection of really useful sites submitted and collected manually by human beings.

The technique that automate submission to social bookmarking sites to gain automatic inbound links is popularized with the term “tag and ping”.

More sophisticated methods involve auto RSS feeds to blog posting, datafeed tools that parse product information from affiliate merchants, blog comment spamming and auto-trackbacking, and others.

Splogs are typical blogs which consist of spammy content generated by one of more of the tools mentioned above.

Of course, there are huge differences between real blog with splogs but sometimes the line is so thin even some bloggers fail to realize what they use is actually cheesy.

Your mileage may vary, but with a basic understanding of what is a blog and how it works, you soon will realize that every tool that tries to automate things will either get you nowhere or even bring bad things to your business.

The last thing you want is to be banned by search engines, deleted from blog search engines or simply being avoided by readers, who are one of the most important currency for your blog.

This is not exactly about blogging. But it is very critical I was obliged to tell you about it.

As a blogger or someone who considers starting your own blog, sooner or later you are going to go out and buy your own hosting service. With the myriad of choices, it is easy to get lost.

Shopping for web hosting may take hours, if not days of research, especially if you decide to do it on your own. The result could be satisfying though.

The purpose of this blog post is to have you think again if you feel like taking shortcut to buying a web hosting package.

A discussion thread in Digital Point points out the lost in ranking by a user.

About 2-3 of weeks or so ago our server was down for about two days… We were ranked #1 and top 10 on a bunch of relevant keywords. Our PR went up in the past month or so from a 4 to a 5 on a couple of pages on our site. This Monday I noticed we dropped of the radar on most rankings but 2 or 3 main ones where we dropped from #1 to #4 and #10… Could the server being down have caused all these?

This was soon confirmed by other forum users. Although the original poster reported lost in ranking for Google, others have reported the same with MSN Search.

Saving a few bucks in web hosting is definitely not worth it.

If the lost in search engine ranking is not enough of a reason to buy a solid web hosting service, think about the lost in traffic, list subscribers and even revenue if your domain is not available for hours, if not days.

I have proven it again and again. Consider web hosting cost is an investment. Before long, the cost will be covered and you save yourself from the headache and other technical issues, which in turn save you time in doing other more important things.

The blogging scam falls into the business opportunities type of scams. I am not a lawyer, nor I am playing one on the Web but in my opinion, blog scam may also be part of other most commonly sent scams most likely to arrive via bulk email.

According to FTC, the description of business opportunities scams is nothing but too good to be true; promising high income with very little effort.

These business opportunities make it sound easy to start a business that will bring lots of income without much work or cash outlay. The solicitations trumpet unbelievable earnings claims of $140 a day, $1,000 a day, or more, and claim that the business doesn’t involve selling, meetings, or personal contact with others, or that someone else will do all the work. Many business opportunity solicitations claim to offer a way to make money in an Internet-related business. Short on details but long on promises, these messages usually offer a telephone number to call for more information. In many cases, you’ll be told to leave your name and telephone number so that a salesperson can call you back with the sales pitch.

What makes blogging business opportunities scam?

As a blogging advocate, I promote the use of blog among business and marketing. But, there are some models that were presented in ways that turn them into more of fraud than legitimate businesses.

Marketers usually promote their products in a package that promise a system or solution to setting up their publishing business in a snap, which potentially bring automatic income of hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, per day.

The million dollar question is: if these systems worked, wouldn’t everyone be using them? The thought of easy money may be appealing, but success generally requires hard work.

Building a legitimate online publishing business using blogs is not only possible but could bring many of the luxury of web business like working from home or wherever places you wish, regarless of time. Many people have done that, but perhaps one of the most successful examples is Weblogs Inc., which was sold to AOL for $25 million.

Here are a list of things that I think make a blogging model or system scam:

• It promises little to no work. Once installed, the system will automatically work day and night without any interference. Before long, you will see results. Best of all, it will churn out endless stream of cash for you.
• Unbelievable earning claims. Hundreds of dollars per day is not uncommon with such system. It becomes a numbers game. If one site / blog earned $1 per day, then 1,000 blogs would earn you $1,000 a day. Afterall, it is effortless to setup.
• Incredibly easy system and steps to follow. No technical skill required. The system works on auto-pilot. If you know how to browse the Web, or point and click, you can operate it.

The truth is, as a tool, we can make a blog work or otherwise for our business. It works if we use it properly and vice versa. Regarding how to use a blog for your business is covered quite thoroughly in this blog.