Blogging: it's a Good Thing

Apparently Martha Stewart has decided that blogging is a good thing, because she has jumped into the blogosphere with The Martha Blog: Up Close & Personal.

Ever the marketing whiz, she is having a blog contest--add your blog to the comment section of her blog and she will check it out and, if you're chosen as one of the winners, she will feature your blog. But hold up--don't think she's going to just read any old blog. In order for her to even consider reviewing your blog to decide if it's Martha-worthy, you have to add a link to her blog from yours.

Seeing as there are, according to Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008, 124 million bloggers in the world and an even more staggering 346 million reading them, getting scads of those bloggers to link to her blog is pure genius in terms of self-promotion. Talk about a way to drive traffic to your site--and for free.

How much traffic, exactly? Ok, well, maybe not EXACTLY, but just to give you a ballpark idea of how much publicity she could potentially be drumming up for herself with her "contest" consider the Internet World Stats' internet usage statistics. According to their data, there are 1,463,632,361 internet users. Go back toTechnorati's State of the Blogosphere and note that 77% of internet users read blogs. Then do the math. That's a LOT of blog readers. And therefore, at least theoretically, a LOT of free advertising for Martha, via links back to her blog from however many of those 124 million bloggers slapping the link to her blog up as I write this.

Just like I am.