What are the returns of running a company blog? – some tips on how to make money with your blog

Whenever you feel that your company is facing difficult times it is recommended to invest in communication with your customers, because direct contact boosts business and decreases fears of trouble that your customers might have. A company blog is one of the best practices, but what are the returns of running a company blog?

Social media and blogs continue to be the most popular online pastimes according to research done by Nielsen for its “State of the Mind: The Social Media Report”. Almost a quarter of total time that Americans spent online was spent browsing blogs and social media. Conclusion: in order to reach both your current and prospect customers, you should create a company blog.

Whether you already have a blog or you are thinking about creating one, you are probably desperate to know how to make money with your blog. It actually consists of the following three steps:

1. Create content
   Creating interesting content will help you attract and retain a loyal group of readers. Try to write about topics of your expertise and topics that interest your readers. Get inspired by other blogs and check Google to see if any topics relevant to your business appear in the top 10 trends. If you know what you want to write about but you simply don’t have the time to do it or you don’t know how to put everything together, you could hire a company to help you out.
2. Build your community and create traffic
   There are several ways to build a loyal community. You could do this through email marketing, creating surveys and contests, and approaching other blog owners to allow you to post blogs written by you, as a guest blogger, on their blog.
   Another very important marketing tool to increase traffic to your company blog is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It helps you getting your website indexed, discovered and analyzed. It also gets your website ranked on the search engines and improves your rankings for keywords users use to search for desired products or services.
3. Start selling ad space
   Once you have built a notable community, it will not be hard to find advertisers that would like to publish banners and relevant advertisements on your website in order to reach your community. You can further leverage your blog by endorsing products, syndicating the content of your blog to that of other websites or guest blogs. Used simultaneously, those methods will generate much online traffic to your company blog.