By Rhonda Campbell

If there’s one thing consumers need to feel before they buy your products or services, it’s trust. To earn consumer trust you must regularly communicate with your target audience. A professional blog that highlights the specific ways your business improves people’s lives can help you to achieve this. The good news is that you can build an eye-catching business blog in less than an hour.

But you might be on the fence, not confident that blogs pay off. Consider this. Since New York magazine broadened its vertical platforms, including focusing more on internal blogs, it has seen its advertising dollars increase by about 25 percent. The number of unique visitors the magazine receives also jumped by about 22 percent according to Paid Content’s October 17, 2011 “NY Magazine’s Focus on Daily Blogs Leads to Traffic Boost” article. As Michael Silberman, New York magazine’s general manager said, “As readers sample the site’s blogs, we have a chance  to convert them to being a newsletter subscriber or an app downloader and in many cases, print subscribers.” This success isn’t just a New York thing. Regardless of where you live, your business can use blogs to generate increased revenues.