Editor’s note: With the author’s permission, we’ve updated this entry to clarify some terms.

By Carlo S. Ople*

Over the past few weeks, there have been talks going around on what advertising agencies and marketers should expect from bloggers. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now, and I think I have enough examples and put enough thought into this to publish it on this blog.

Companies who want to tap bloggers should be aware of the different kinds of bloggers. Not all bloggers can influence your target market, and not all of them can have the same level of interaction with their readers.

I’ve generally defined the types of bloggers into these 4 categories: Value, Hobby, Journal and Google. There’s a fifth type which I’ll share at the end of the post. Note that these categories can overlap, and in fact some of the best bloggers have stricken a balance on how to be all 4. However, these are rare bloggers. Most of the bloggers right now just fall to either 1 or 2 of these categories.

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