• Branding blogs
• Monetization blogs

Branding blogs: Build either your personal brand or a product/service brand. An example of this could be high-end gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer’s blog or this blog which focuses on blogging, affiliate marketing and traffic generation.

On the other hand, you have “Monetization blogs” which are intended to generate income. The blogs can serve either as traffic generation tools to push visitors to a site, or sell products or services themselves. Product review blogs designed to close transactions fall into this category.

Monetization blogs also include blogs created solely to monetize Google’s Adsense contextual advertising program. Such blogs feature prominent locations for adsense advertising blocks, or other advertising networks like Yahoo Search Marketing or Adbrite’s ad blocks.

You can recognize an adsense-optimized (or MFA – “Made for Adsense”) blog through it’s template which gives more prominence to the ad blocks, rather than the content.

Here’re two examples:

Many of these templates are available freely and you can locate them by googling for “blog adsense theme” or “blog adsense template”.

I’ve seen some newer blogs which have made me raise my eyebrows more than once.

For online marketers seeking to establish yourself (especially if you’re planning to develop your own product or find joint venture partners), it makes sense to establish a branding blog to build up your reputation and credibility in the marketplace.

What I don’t understand is why some of these marketers choose to use a “MFA template” for their branding blog.

This will hurt you because you’re working very hard to bring visitors to your blog and then sending them away when they click on a link which probably earns you $0.02 to about $0.50 (for Internet Marketing).

It would make more sense (and make for better income generation) to bring visitors to your branding blog, present them with quality content, build a relationship and aim for a higher value activity like product development or entering into a joint venture.

Starting out with a overt monetization template also subconsciously send out the message to your visitors that you’re pushing short term income generation (with your 10 visitors a day), rather than focusing on building readership.

A branding blog represents your online presence, and every element on your blog, presents a facet that presence to readers, customers and ultimately in the long term, your friends and allies.

Managing that relationship effectively will go a long way in ensuring your online longevity.