The act of getting your site, service or product hyperlinked on 3rd party blogs is considered to be blog seeding. Blog seeding has started to become a more acceptable form of online marketing in the corporate world to drive traffic and build awareness amongst customers.

There are still two camps of believers regarding the practice of blog seeding for business, one that believes that blog seeding is an acceptable form of online marketing and an effective tool to drive awareness while the other camp believes that companies loose the trust of their customers by paying for blog links, reviews and placement thus diluting their brand and skewing the blogosphere in their favour.

I believe if done right blog seeding can be an effective online marketing tool for small and large companies alike. Outlined below are a few high level steps you should take before jumping into the frying pan (so as to speak!) 1) You need to have a resource spend some quality time investigating present blogosphere perceptions of your product or service (If things are really negative you have a lot of work to do before going after any blog seeding strategy) 2) Identify bloggers that are believers (evangelist), In-betweeners and non-believers 3) Identify what you want from each of these groups (Your blog seeding plan) 4) Identify a budget (In some cases you may have to give away a product for free) and 5) Put someone in charge of checking-up on the blogs regularly.

Remember that you do not control the blogosphere and should plan of the unexpected – Your believers becoming very vocal non-believers. If you have not given the blogger a specific request then expect them to bring any and everything to their blog posts. Chose your product or service very carefully and follow the steps above and you may just have a successful blog seeding project on your hands.