Statistics: How blogs improve your business

Today, various bloggers are writing on the topic, "Are bloggers as important as bloggers think they are?"  One of my favorite bloggers, Paul Anater of Kitchen and Residential Design wrote a great post on the subject.  He did a much better job than I could do, so you should read his post if you want a thoughtful answer to the question.  He's also someone who has built a solid offline business based on the success of his blog.


The part of his post that was most relevant to business blogs was the statistic he posted about blog readers, which he got from Technorati and media agency Universal McCann.: 77 percent of Internet users read blogs. That is huge! In North America, that means more than 205 million people are reading blogs.


How do I get some of those millions over to my business blog?


Targeting happens by creating content that's relevant to your potential audience.  Here are some statistics about how business blogs have improved leads, sales and Web site views.  All data is from hubspot.com.

• Frequent blog posting improves the chances of acquiring a customer.  In a survey by Hubspot.com, 100% of businesses that blogged multiple times a day got at least one customer directly from someone reading the blog.  Companies that didn't blog often received fewer customers -- only 13% of businesses that blogged less than monthly acquired new prospects.

• Blogging improves businesses' rankings in Web searches. Companies that blog have 434% more idexed pages than companies that don't.

• More people visit business Web sites that have blogs. In a survey of more than 1,500 small businesses, companies that blogged had 55% more visitors than companies that didn't.

Making decisions from the data

Obviously, businesses need to weigh whether the cost of running a blog is more effective than other costs in the marketing budget.  There's more statistics on hubspot.com that demonstrate how inbound marketing efforts are much more cost-effective than outbound.  But then again, if you have blog five times a day and no one reads it, that's also pretty ineffective.  To make your blog relevant, it needs to have:

• Keywords that allow your target to find you
• Content that keeps your customer there
• A call to action: products or services that solve your customers' issues - the reason they were searching the Web in the first place!