Yes, the good old topic of blogging and how it impacts the growth of your business. Here is a nice infographic on blogging and not blogging affects your bottom line.
If you’re not much interested in infographics I’m going to write down a few figures that have been discussed in the infographic. Here they are:
- 57% of companies that blog have one way or another acquired customers from their blog. This is actually true. Whenever I am regularly blogging – although the nature of my business is such that blogging perfectly fits the bill because it is mostly about writing and content marketing – my targeted traffic increases which in return generates more queries.
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You may have been underestimating blogging for business. Do you know that 77% of Internet users in the USA have read blogs? Here are some more figures:
- 61% of US customers and clients have made purchases after reading blog posts
- 81% of American customers trust advice and information published on business blogs
- 82% customers claim that they enjoy reading relevant and topical information from various brands
- 70% of customers and clients learn about the companies they do business with through blog posts and articles rather than ads
- If you publish blog posts relevant to your business 16-20 times in a month you traffic doubles
- If you blog regularly the count of new visits to your website increases by 80%
- If your business blog contains more than 200 blog articles you may get 4.6 times more traffic than those that have just 200 blog posts or articles
- Small businesses that publish a blog regularly get 126% more leads compared to those that don’t
- In a 30-day period if you blog 16-20 times the number of leads you get will increase 3 times
- B2B businesses that blog regularly get 67% more leads than those that don’t
Why blogging sometimes doesn’t work for some businesses?
The main problem is quality content of course. You need to provide value to your visitors by providing exceptional content. This is also important because there is lots of noise on the Internet and you need to stand out.
Regularity is another aspect that you strictly need to keep in mind. There is no use creating high-quality content if you are not publishing your content on an ongoing basis. Spurts of publishing doesn’t help much and in fact it also wastes the time that you spend during those spurts. Regularity is a must. In fact regularity is so important that the blogs that publish daily have 5 times more traffic than those that post weekly or less.
Another problem is lack of exposure. How do people know that you’re publishing great content on your business blog? You need to promote your business blog content using appropriate channels including industry-specific forums, social networking websites, LinkedIn groups and Quora.
What is the greatest benefit of blogging even if it doesn’t fetch you direct business?
- Your search engine rankings improve
- Your content is shared on social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, on a regular basis
- The blog posts that you create will always exist in the search engine databases
- Over the time the search engine rankings of your existing blog posts keep on increasing, getting you new traffic for a long time