I read a post by Frank Reed this morning that talked about the decline of blogging among the Inc. 500, from 50% in 2010 to 37% in 2011. I agree with his theory:
companies are looking for the easy way out. It’s that simple. You can use Facebook and Twitter as more of a customer service and customer retention tool by its more conversational nature (that is quite limited though depending on the level of talent that is maintaining it). It’s also easier to put together quick blasts of content rather than develop an idea in a blog post.
Blogging is hard work. There is certainly an attraction to the speed at which various social media platforms can drive traffic to your website. . . but your blog (with fresh, engaging content) is what keeps them at your site or encourages them to sign-up for more of your great information. The is the core concept of web lead generation.
Twitter drives website traffic up 317%; 66% more leads
Our own experiment with Twitter this month shows the allure. . . with a simple campaign that tweeted 4 times a day, five days a week, we have driven our website visits up 317% in 30 days! Any marketer would be excited about that!
To make this kind of growth profitable (leads are up 66%), we needed a lot of new content on our website (blog posts), good calls to action on every post, and effective landing pages. Building all this over and over again for 30 days is really time consuming. Blogging is hard work!
How to achieve double-digit lead growth
According to the The State of Inbound Lead Generation study by HubSpot, there is a direct correlation between how many blog pages are indexed by Google and the amount of blog traffic the site gets.
As a matter of fact, increasing your pages by 50-100 can bring as high as DOUBLE DIGIT blog traffic GROWTH!
The graph below shows that traffic generation jumps significantly once a site achieves 300+ indexed pages.
We teach our clients to build page volume by posting regularly — every day, or at least 3-4 times a week. We also provide a writing service to support those companies who simply don’t have the internal capacity to generate this much content.
Take-aways for 2012
- Blogging works to generate traffic and leads. The more you blog, the more traffic you will get. (And if you’re following best practices and use long tail keywords, this will be highly-targeted traffic!)
- If you don’t have a blog, start one this week!
- If you haven’t blogged in awhile or you’re irregular with your blogging, create an editorial calendar for blogging and stick with it.
- If you want to see if your blogging is really making a difference, call us. We’ll help you look at your metrics in a whole new way.
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