The Internet web log, or blog for short, originated as a platform for people's personal musings and casual commentary on life and their interests. While many bloggers still maintain this personal approach to blogging, it has become a very popular and effective venue for marketing an online business.

Blog marketing as a business merely means directing your efforts towards making money. Creating a blog with the intention of making an significant level of income, like any business, does require both persistence and consistency. There are techniques and tools in place that will have to be learned for maximum good results.

The Internet is all about information. An essential part of any money making blog is the content written on your pages. It needs to be both informative and above all, original. Merely copying information from elsewhere either on the Web or from a book is illegal. Reported plagiarism to your blog host can get your blog deleted. If you have developed affiliate contacts through a business or Google's AdSense, you will be banned and your earnings forfeited. After all that, you may well still find yourself in court and subject to a lawsuit from the people whose work you have stolen.

There are options available for the for-profit blogger to assure good, and above all, legal content for their blog. Even if you are not good at writing yourself, there are a large number of forums and websites dedicated to helping bloggers meet up with professional freelance writers who can provide the content for you. You must expect that there will be overhead in blog marketing just as there is in any business. While it may take a bit of effort on your part, articles are available under Private Label Rights (PLR) licenses. These PLR articles are prewritten content that you may use freely. It is best to do a bit of rewriting to make them unique from all the other copies of the articles other webmasters or bloggers may also have.

Never underestimate the power of good backlinks to your blog from other sites. Find sites that are in your same general area of focus and contact the site owner. Learn how to find sites that have a good ranking for this. The search engines will take the type and credibility of the site a link is coming from into consideration when assigning a rank to your own blog. Building backlinks is an ongoing task. As well as directly requesting backlinks, there are sites that charge for the link. Usually these types of link sites are picky about the sites they allow in their directory so the search engines tend to give them more credibility than a free directory that just accepts links without regard to content.

Blog marketing is not rocket science. It may take a while to learn all that is involved and it will take perseverance as your blog grows in ranking and accessibility to greater numbers of visitors. Once you begin to learn just what is available to help make your blog grow and stick to the process just as you would any job, you can find your work becoming more fun and a lot more profitable.