Blogging has seen a meteoric rise throughout the internet. It is predicted that there will be over 31 million blogs available by 2020. Blogging has grown exponentially over the years and in 2018 it was calculated that over 5 million blogs came out every day. While that seems like a huge number, over 2 billion people say they read blogs on a daily basis.
As a business, it can be difficult to launch or maintain a blog and therefore you may let it go by the wayside, offering priority to other forms of marketing. However, statistics show that a blog should become a critical part of your strategic arsenal.
In this list of 100 content marketing statistics from Siege Media, it’s possible to see just how pervasive blogging can be and how it is being used to generate leads and promote better customer engagement.
H2: How to Create a Successful Business Blog
It may be difficult to know where to begin, but there are a number of metrics that point to successful methodologies to use when creating a blog.
- Title length: While this statistic may seem a little arbitrary, it’s true that traffic is consistently higher when a blog title has between 6 and 13 words.
- Post length: While long form content is good for generating leads (about 9x more successful than shorter pieces) it’s not useful if the articles are too long. 500 – 1000 words has been the sweet spot for most posts, with this length making up about 85% of total posts. Only 8% of posts in 2018 were over 2000 words.
- Make posts skimmable: Most people admit that they scan articles more often than “read” them when on the internet. Optimize your posts for scanning by putting in lists and bulleted content, or callouts and quotes.
- Utilize imagery: Posts with images were close to 95%, more likely to be read than those that did not contain pictures. Most bloggers put in more than one pic.
- Track your performance: The demographic information of those that follow your blog can be very useful for other marketing initiatives. Only 34% of companies are said to properly track their blog performance, so this information might give you a leg up on competitors.
- Take your time: It takes an average of three and a half hours for someone to finish a post – so do not expect to put out massive amounts of content if you don’t have the writers to do it well.
- Delegate: If you don’t have time to write all of your articles, consider outsourcing or lletting qualified people guest post. Close to 60% of business blogs that are outsourced also contain guest posts.
H3: What if I am B2B?
You might think that because you are a B2B company that a blog is not useful, but marketers from over 40% of B2B business rely heavily on their blogs and over 50% say they want to make blogs their top inbound marketing priority.
At this point you should make sure you are investing in a robust blog in any way your can. The numbers speak for themselves. Concentrating marketing resources on content marketing and, more specifically, a blog can yeild a high ROI!
Guest post courtesy of Vincent Nero
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