Blogging is one of the most important pillars of a successful inbound marketing strategy. HubSpot’s recent 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report revealed that 82% of companies who blogged reported a positive return on their inbound marketing investments. 42% of marketers indicated that they’d acquired at least one customer through their blogs.
The Blogging Breakdown
The company’s earlier report, Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000+ Businesses, broke down the impact of blogging more specifically. We learned that companies blogging 15 times per month or more drew five times as much website traffic as companies without blogs. The aggregate number of posts had a significant impact, as well. Businesses with more than 200 blog posts receive five times as many leads as those with 10 or fewer posts. In short, regular blogging will significantly help in building website traffic and leads.
How Does Blogging Help in Building Website Traffic and Leads?
Blogging helps to increase website traffic and supports your inbound marketing efforts in a variety of ways, including:
- Regular blogging means fresh, relevant content is added to your site on a regular basis;
- Blogging provides an easy opportunity to target popular keywords;
- Your blog gives prospects and customers a reason to return to your website on a regular basis;
- High quality blog posts invite social sharing, which draws traffic directly and may boost your search engine rankings as well;
- Blog posts help refresh landing pages and offers by providing related content from which to link to those invitations to share contact information;
- Blog posts provide an opportunity to link to core site pages using keyword rich anchor text that helps with search engine optimization;
- Blogging establishes your expertise and builds trust in your brand; and
- Your blog provides an opportunity to interact with and solidify relationships with your audience through comments.
Making the Most of Your Blog
To capitalize on the opportunities your blog offers for building website traffic and the success of your inbound marketing efforts:
- Create great content: don’t just blog to reach your target number of posts per week or month, but to communicate something of value to your audience;
- Optimize your posts: regular blogging allows you to target a wide range of keywords and to support your most important terms;
- Tie your blog posts to offers: though the focus of your blog should be on providing value, be sure to use some posts to introduce related premium content and even products or services;
- Blog regularly: both blogging frequency and aggregate number of posts have an impact on traffic and leads, so make blogging a priority.
Blogging was one of the earliest content marketing tools, and it has proven its worth again and again as inbound marketing has evolved. Make the most of this low-cost, highly-effective strategy.
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