Nov
21
2016
The Point of Business Blogging
This is a topic that crops up from time to time. Businesses usually don’t have time to blog themselves, but feel dubious about spending money on it. Which begs the question, how effective is blogging for businesses? In other words, does it work? The first thing every business needs to know are the 5 goals of blogging, which all revolve around growth:
- Attract more website visitors/customers
- Increase Google search rankings
- Grow number of new monthly contacts
- Give business personality
- Stay connected to customers
The amount of revenue and number of customers will directly reflect the number of visitors that go to your site. The more visitors, the more customers. The more new contacts, the more exponential the growth. The basic fact is that every one of the 6 customers we regularly blog for have experienced significant (2-5 times increase in important categories) to amazing results (more than 10 times increase in important categories). Here's the "worst" result we have had to show you just how effective blogging is for businesses.
Case Study : How Effective Blogging Is for Businesses
We started working with this client in October of 2015. This client had been blogging 1-2 times per week, but had not made a focused effort towards publishing with good keyword phrases and on a consistent schedule. We will compare their data the first month we started blogging with them (October 2015) versus a year later (October 2016)
When we started working with them, we create a more consistent blogging schedule, more specific keyword phrases, and honed in on only the most relevant potential customers. Here's a quick list of terms for the graphs below.
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Site Traffic: Number of Sessions for the website the blog is on (actual blog Page Views are higher)
- Blog Views: Number of Sessions for the blog (actual blog Page Views are higher)
- Sessions: is the number of separate times users visited the site (i.e. each time they visit the site is 1 session, and in each session they can view many different pages)
- New Active Contact: Number of new, legitimate contacts who exchange contact information for content offers that appear at the end of each blog - i.e. the number of "friends" your website gains
- Subscribers: Number of people who choose to be automatically notified every time a new blog article is published - i.e., the number of people who are "following" the blog
- Organic Search: Number of people who visited the website from searching with Google, Bing, or Yahoo - this statistic is extremely important
Here’s what happened. And keep in mind, this is just an "average" example of how effective blogging is for businesses. With other clients who are having smaller traffic and a more niche market, we regularly see website traffic double within a month. It might sound like bragging, but it's not - it's just the truth.
Blog Traffic
Blog traffic is the most obvious marker of how effective the blogging is for bring in customers. When we first started blogging, they were receiving 2000 visitors per month. A year later, the blog was receiving over 350% more visitors.
Website Traffic
Like blog traffic, website traffic is another important indicator for how important blogging is for bring people to the website to view products and services. Over the course of the year we helped more than double the amount of monthly visitors to the website.
New Active Contacts
As you can see below, the number of new active contacts was 5 times higher in October 2016 (a year after regular blogging) vs October 2015:
The reasons Contacts are so important is because you have access to email these prospective customers. Email is without question the most effective way to reach the largest number of potential customers. If the client would have continued at their current rate, they would have garnered 720 new contact. Instead, they gained a total of
Organic Search Visitors (SEO)
Over the course of a year, our client was receiving just under 2 times as many monthly website visitors from search results.
Total Subscribers
As you can see in the graph below, our client started with just over 34 contact who regularly received emails when a new blog was published. After a year of blogging, they had over 200 subscribers - an almost 700% increase.
The reasons that blogs are so effective for businesses is that they make a business personal, and personality is attractive in any businesses. Moreover, professional bloggers are experienced in targeting people who are most likely to be interested the particular services of a businesses.