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Can Branded Blogs be Franchised and Affiliated

Chances are the food joint you eat at be it Subways, Burger King, McDonalds or even a T.G.I. Friday's is probably a franchise.

A lot of businesses look to creating franchises with partners to further expand their brand, reach and ultimately bottom line. Affiliate marketing on the internet works in the same way, where you sign up for a websites affiliate program, promote their products and get a percentage of the sale price.

As the blogosphere expands and evolves blogs are becoming branded with the likes of Shoemoney, Problogger, Techcrunch, Mashable, Gigaom, Steve Pavlina and up coming blogger John Chow to name a few.  Basically they are creating a persona around their blogs and becoming more of a business rather than just a site where they post, but the reader doesn't realize it too much. So going forward...Can Branded Blogs be Franchised and Affiliated in the future?

As with every form of business people look to expand and they can only go so much further as making themselves extra subdomains as fr.techcrunch.com or have related blogs like cruchgear, newteevee and that sort of thing.

But would they be willing to make themselves into a full blown online business by having other blogs promote them in an affiliate or franchise type of setup?

• The Affiliate Setup
  For example say we have *GigaOm and the blog wants to now make their network and influence grow. So they would either sign up with an affiliate marketing company like CJ.com or LinkShare.com and have other blog owners promote their site on either a CPC or CPA basis. The affiliate then makes a commission for the visit or action performed on the site and makes some extra cash. GigaOm gets more traffic and more advertising revenue.

• The Franchise Setup
  GigaOm again, here the network wants to expand their brand and reach. Why? To get more advertising revenue could be one reason. The only way I see this working is if a branded blogger were to hire another blogger, give them a domain name, access to press releases, insider tips and the like - stuff that they usually don't have the time or space to publish on their own blogs and have them publish it. In return for getting those interesting bits of information, and a slice of ad revenue, the franchisee owner would have to embed ads, that GigaOm would solicit, on their blogs.

  So say I'm an advertiser and I want to advertise on GigaOm. GigaOm offers to have my Ad also displayed through all/some of their franchised websites for an additional price. The franchisee owner can get a set price for taking the work load of GigaOm from all those product releases and news. All they have to do is blog stuff that GigaOm normally wouldn't be able to do.

Would it work?

I don't know, it's just an idea I had. But would you support such a move by any branded blog and either become an affiliate or purchase a franchise?

At first you saw blogs just being web journals then slowly you saw Google Adsense along with Affiliate Programs which were upped by Podcasting and Video. For now the Widget seems to reign supreme as a way to add a lot of different money making things into one space. Paid to blog services are sprouting for bloggers to make more money.

I guess blog affiliation and franchising is inevitable, just When and Who will be the First? Is the question.

*GigaOm used for illustration purposes only

Technorati Tags: open source idea, web 2.0, blogs, paid to blog, make money online

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• Dated: March 24, 2007