How to use your company's blog (and make money with it)

Words are a powerful tool. Together with a melody, they make "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more alive than ever. The words of the final scene of "Blade Runner" are the ones that catch you in the rain. They are the ones that pierce you in Martin Luther King's speech, and the ones that mesmerize you in a good book. 

British writer Diane Setterfield says that "words make you a prisoner." And words, in expert hands can also make you money, for example by using your company's blog.

The blog is a tool we can use in marketing that has incredible potential to help our brand. That work goes far beyond the traffic it attracts to the web, and by taking care of the content, the company blog can be key in our marketing strategy.

Keys to a successful corporate blog

As with any marketing tool, it is key that we first do a research of both the target we are addressing and the type of content that the target is looking for, in order to connect with them in a simpler way.

Blogger blogs stopped being used a long time ago, so integrate your company blog into your website, as another section. Design, both visual and editorial, is vital. Take care of it and think about your brand identity, because the blog must breathe the same air, photos included. If you have a more rogue brand, it doesn't make sense for your articles to be written as if they were written by a member of the RAE. Analyze your voice as a brand and use it in the same way on the blog.

But what are you going to talk about? It is important to be clear from the beginning what will be the theme of your blog, and listen and observe your audience to adapt your content to them without losing the essence of your brand. And forget about constantly selling. A content of value for the customer will do much more for you than trying to sell, sell and sell at all costs, because the reader will end up getting bored. For example, it makes sense if you have a brand of hair products made with natural ingredients to write an article about tips on how to make our time on the planet have less impact on the environment, instead of the last five articles on your blog talking about how great your products are.

SEO is very important when we talk about a blog since it will determine how we will be positioned in that great ocean of information that is Google. The best thing to do is to have a specialized team that can make the most of the blog using SEO to your advantage.

Once you have observed and studied your audience and analyzed the style and content you will use, it is essential that you consider the same as with any social network: objectives to be met. This way the strategy will always be much more effective. Planning is key, think in advance articles that can be part of your company blog and set the dates of publication of the same, always thinking that quality is more important than quantity. It is better to publish one a month with interesting and valuable content, than one a day with content that does not contribute anything to the reader.

Finally, it is important that the blog is a funnel that receives visitors from other channels, such as social networks or email marketing. Using the rest of your tools to attract traffic to the blog, such as Pinterest or Instagram, is key to getting future customers to your blog. 

Benefits of having a successful company blog

• Improve your brand image. The blog is an ideal informative tool to let your customers know who you are. In addition, by offering content that adds value, the audience will have a very favorable opinion of you.

• Improve your position in search engines. The existence of quality content helps to meet Google's requirements to increase your rankings, which has a positive impact on improving your positioning.

• It helps you build a community and inform it. Company blogs such as Whatsapp, for example, use this space to inform about improvements in the application, changes or how to solve possible failures, so it acts in some way as a customer service. In addition, you can form a network around the blog of recurring users who come to it and that will be your small community.

• It is a source of knowledge to help you improve. Like any measurable tool, it helps you to learn and to identify more easily what works and what does not.

• It is a sales tool. Not only does it help you at an image level, the blog offers you another window to sell either products or services, and in a much more natural and subtle way.

Ways to make money with a company blog

There are several "formulas" to monetize a company blog but beware, it will not be to start writing words one after another and that the money comes into our account as it comes out of a slot machine. None of them is magical and all of them require time and effort. For a blog to work and be successful, it is essential to be consistent and the quality of the information it provides.

Through a blog you can earn money with affiliation and advertising, for example, which would get sales to third parties. Even with traffic we can make a blog profitable. But in the case of a company blog what we are interested in is to attract future customers and get to be in their heads, which can only be achieved with hard work and dedication.

Let's take an example: you have arrived here, a marketing and web design company, because you were looking for how to monetize your blog. You have read our article, which has given you some basic notions on how to start this new project, but you have realized that your website needs to implement some changes in the design to be able to host that blog you need so much. That collaboration opportunity might not have existed without this article.

One more example with a product instead of a service. You have been teleworking for a year and you notice that at the end of the day you are tired and your eyesight is getting worse. You search on google for some of the symptoms and land on the blog of an optician who talks about eyestrain. Among the remedies to avoid it are some eye drops sold on the website itself. You are just one click away from solving your problem and it's all thanks to the blog.

It is not that every time a person reads your company's blog you earn an extra euro, it is that it is a perfect window for the world to get to know you and to find your place in it. A formula to improve your brand image, to provide content to the community and for those potential customers to see in you the solution to their problems.

Main photo: Anomaly