It's easy to embrace the blogosphere without creating an overt advertorial relationship. Here's how brands and blogs are working to overcome the stigma of "selling out."

About 10 years ago, the term "blogger" may have conjured the image of an older, likely balding man alternating between pushing up his glasses and plunking away at his keyboard until the wee hours of the morning. Today, we have a very different image of bloggers and their content. The collective voices of millions of blogs have forever altered not just the way consumers discover information and make decisions, but the overall media landscape as well. And as traditional media struggles to grow ad revenue in a Web 2.0 world, industry estimates put some individual bloggers' "mini media empires" in the ballpark of around $100 million or more.

The medium has matured more quickly over the past two years, fueled by mainstream consumer adoption. Web surfers have embraced blogs as trusted sources of information on everything from travel and technology to entertainment and sports. According to comScore, there are more than 77 million unique blog visitors in the U.S., a number greater than the total audience of Facebook or MySpace. While some of these visits may be casual or entertainment-oriented, 50 percent of all readers report that blogs influence their purchase decisions, and the majority report that online reviews are often more helpful than speaking with a sales associate.

With such a captive audience at the ready, blogs have been on advertisers' collective radar screen for some time but, until recently, it appeared brands were making more mistakes than friends when it came to working with blogs in a commercial sense. Bloggers have a historical resistance to brand sponsorship due to the perception of "selling out" -- an understandable concern given the highly personal nature of blogging.

However, bloggers are still entrepreneurs, and today there are a good number of bloggers proving that a happy medium exists between sticking to an editorial viewpoint and being compensated for original content in the process.

So, how exactly has the brand and blogger courtship evolved?
It wasn't always so congenial. As many brands tried heavy-handedly to influence blogger content -- by spamming them with irrelevant information to influence stories, or exchanging content for cash via something like the old pay-per-post model -- bloggers grappled with the prospect of taking money to further a brand's commercial interests.

These initial overtures to bloggers treated them not as people, but as soul-less manufacturers of content, so naturally the blogosphere retaliated. Efforts to influence bloggers' writing style and coverage were promptly rebuked; spamming publishers with irrelevant or annoying material was rewarded by bloggers outing perpetrators with mocking posts. Though the pay-per-post model is still leveraged by a small number of bloggers (Technorati's Annual State of the Blogosphere suggests about 6 percent of bloggers employ this approach) countless others balk at the idea of shilling companies or products solely to make money.

Some brands like Dell and Amazon have set the bar for the right way to engage, but many are still traveling on the learning curve; sometimes even moving against the curve and being too brash as a result. Case in point: it was only in January of this year that Target publicly stated it "doesn’t participate with non-traditional news outlets." Other brands continue to adopt an aggressive method of engagement without knowing how a particular blogger will react in advance, which risks poisoning the relationship for good.

So what is working?
Advertising. Several years ago, Google made it possible for someone publishing content, no matter how personal or obscure, to derive revenue from advertiser dollars. Today, AdSense is far from the only game in town. When it comes to how, when and where bloggers allow brands to subsidize their pages, they have their choice among hundreds of ad networks, all able to serve specific categories, sizes and shapes of blogs. While launching a blog and running ads in the side bar is by no means a recipe for financial success, blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually from advertising, according to Technorati. Affiliate marketing programs (such as the Amazon Associates program) allow bloggers to squeeze more revenue by directing traffic to brands.

Of course, some bloggers eschew the network model altogether and go straight to the source. About 19 percent of bloggers negotiate advertising with brands directly, which takes the blogger/brand relationship to a whole new level. In this scenario, the blogger and brand engagement has moved past "Hey will you write about me?" to "Hey, let's strike a deal" -- a much different dynamic and power play between the two parties.

That's not to say today's version of the brand/blogger relationship is wholly defined by advertising deals. Many brands have yet to buy an inch of ad space within blogs, but embrace the blogosphere as a medium to seed conversations about their products or services. Brand marketers are learning what successful PR folks have known for years: there can be a natural intersection between their desires and a blogger's needs to create meaningful content for readers.

The stats speak for themselves: 90 percent of bloggers said they talk about brands in an unpaid manner, and four out of five post product reviews. Tapping into this existing behavior and making a blogger's job easier -- whether that is with an offer to preview a new product or access to a person within the company who can answer detailed questions -- are the cornerstones of successful engagement programs.

What's next?
We'll continue to watch brands, but technology providers and bloggers themselves push the envelope when it comes to how content creators and commercial interests can align themselves around mutually beneficial goals. This much is true: brands are increasingly respecting blogger church and state boundaries, and are learning that the power of the blogosphere lies in its truth and authenticity

Ad models are following suit. Emerging pricing structures and targeting platforms are designed to reward the relevance, depth and quality of content, as well as a blogger's ability to attract a passionate readership that is highly tuned into a particular subject. The net effect of such approaches means lowering the barrier to ad entry for a whole new cadre of smaller, focused bloggers who are eager to monetize but still struggling to hit 1,000 page views a month.

As long as web readers continue to spend time on these niche social media sites, brands will continue to offer bloggers the olive branch. From the looks of it, today's savvy blogger knows the right way to take it.

Todd Parsons is co-founder and chief community officer, BuzzLogic.