How to Turn Blogging Into a Revenue Channel

Why your blog should be a BIG focus

A blog gives your company a personal face. It can be a simple way to convey complicated messages to your customers and can help you build a loyal following. It isn’t, however, something you should build on your website without giving serious consideration to the time and energy it will need.

For a blog to be effective, it must be kept up to date with new, relevant and interesting content. It can easily become stale if it’s not updated, so regular blog posts must be built into your long term communications plan. Done effectively, a blog can be a hugely important tool in engaging and keeps an audience coming back to your site.

Implementing a blog will reduce the probability of cyberspace explorers bouncing off your site and straight back out into the abyss – if it provides them with compelling and constantly updated content. The intent is to ensure that visitors stay on your site longer, and increase its authority. This will help you retain customers by giving them a reason to come back to your site to get information they need and proving your industry know-how.

A blog is crucial when it comes to SEO and social media. After all, Facebook and Twitter users are much more likely to click on different and interesting links rather than the same link to a static website. So existing customers that like your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter, will be more inclined to do business with you again if you frequently post new and interesting blog posts on your social media profiles.

Seed your content

Seeding your content is all about creating the right conditions for it to be viewed, shared and re-posted by as many people as possible. Even the most thought provoking, engaging content can be wasted if it’s not seeded properly.

The most popular and effective way to seed content is via social media. Utilise as many social channels as you can, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. For this to be effective, you need to attract the attention of a social media audience. To achieve this, look for opportunities to re-post or comment on content published by popular people including celebrities and key industry figures. For increased outreach opportunities, consider guest blogging or paid exposure.

Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.

Brian Clark

Measure the ROI

To measure the return on investment (ROI) of content, you need to calculate how much you’ve spent on content and how much income is attributable to that content.

If you contract out your content then calculating spend is easy. However, if it’s done in house then you need to keep track of how long employees are spending on this task and apportion their salary accordingly.

To work out income, you’ll need to track the audience actions triggered by the content, such as click-throughs, sign-ups, etc. Using tools such as Google Analytics can then help you to work out the average number of actions that it takes to generate one new sale. If your sales are offline you’ll need to track customers in another way, such as special offer codes.