Usually in my blog posts, I take a concept related to affiliate marketing and explain it in a way I hope is beneficial. Today, I’d like to touch on the concept of the blog itself.

Don’t worry – I won’t drone on about the definition of a blog. (That would be like the teacher in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” calling the roll in the classroom: “Bueller…Bueller…Bueller…”) You already know that a blog is an interactive online journal, or you wouldn’t be reading this particular blog.

Instead, I’ll focus on a key question: should an affiliate marketer build out a website, or a blog?

The question gave me pause. After all, I’ve said from time to time that one of the most important things you can do in starting an affiliate marketing business is to build a website. By that I’ve meant a “traditional” site, containing a home page and links to additional web pages that help you promote products and/or services.

Starting a blog instead of a traditional website has one particular disadvantage – you have to create content nearly every day to entice readers to come back time and time again. (Then again, you may find yourself doing that with a traditional website.)

But blogs have advantages, too. For starters, producing fresh content every day gives readers a reason to revisit a blog regularly. That can lead to increased sales. Also important, search engines like Google take notice of a blog’s daily dose of fresh content. A traditional website without regular updates runs the risk of sinking in the search engine rankings. A blog that is updated daily, with targeted content, can maintain a high place in those rankings.

This can lead to marketing opportunities. For example, you could devote a series of posts to particular features of the merchant’s product. Each post could contain the important keywords and links to the merchant’s website. You could also experiment with keywords, inserting a different one in each day’s post and tracking the resulting progress in the search engines. And you can utilize the readers’ comments to fine-tune your marketing messages.

As blogs continue to impact our daily web activity, could the traditional website become obsolete within a few years? I’ll leave that answer to you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.