Are you having doubts about making blogging a part of your content marketing strategy?
In this article, I list 11 most important blogging statistics for content marketers that will hopefully help you make that decision.
Let’s start!
1. 70% of consumers learn about a company through articles rather than ads.
Because of its inherent value-driven nature, blogging for content marketing is one of the best brand building-blocks in the brand-building strategy.
When done right, you could say that blogging is brand building 101.
Why?
Because blogging enables you to provide a tremendous amount of value to your audience while your posts remain active in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for years.
Here’s a good example of what blogging can do for your business.
Tresnicmedia did a case study where they decide to publish 50 blog articles in 5 weeks and measure the results.
That’s a very aggressive publishing schedule, but it shows that the more quality content you publish, the better.
In those 5 weeks of publishing 50 blog articles, Tresnicmedia saw a 438% increase in website traffic.
This shows that creating and publishing blog content was working much better than the marketing efforts they’ve employed before.
They committed to publishing content that provides value and their audience received the content very well.
You can check the entire Tresnicmedia blogging case study here.
2. 61% of consumers made a purchase after reading recommendations on a blog.
People take product recommendations from blog articles all the time.
Now, that doesn’t mean you should go and shill products in your blog posts left and right.
The key takeaway from this statistic point isn’t “cram more product recommendations in blog posts.”
No, that’s not the right way of effectively recommending products and services through blog posts.
Only when done the right way, you’ll be able to build trust with your audience through your content.
What is the right way?
Promoting products and services through blog posts works the best when you’re doing it only when it makes sense.
Some blog articles you’ll create will be of educational and informational nature and there’s not going to be any opportunities in them to recommend products organically.
And that’s perfectly fine.
Selling just isn’t the purpose of educational posts.
Not directly, anyway.
On the other hand, when you do create a sales-oriented blog post, you should still aim to provide as much value as possible with it.
Because only then will people actually feel safe and inclined to buy from you.
A nice guideline is to have at least three informative posts for every sales-oriented post.
Obviously, the better this ratio is in favor of informative content, the more effective your sales-oriented posts become.
And that’s because of the sheer amount of trust your informative pieces helped build with your audience.
3. Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website.
Backlinks are a big part of SEO.
The more quality backlinks you have, the better your content does in the SERPs.
Not only do your articles other people link to perform better in the SERPs, but your entire domain is also held in higher regard by the search engines.
The SEO benefits of blogging don’t stop at backlinks.
The more content you publish, the more keywords you’ll start ranking for and the more keywords you rank for, the more exposure your entire domain gets.
Remember the Tresnicmedia case study from the beginning of the article?
At the time they were done publishing 50 articles, their domain ranked for 496 different keywords.
Which was 470 more keywords than Google has indexed on their website before the case study.
That’s a HUGE jump in opportunities to get free traffic from Google to their company website.
Because Tresnicmedia created a blog article on their case study, both you and I have heard about the company.
I by searching for case studies on ROI of blogging and you by reading this article.
Their case study popped high up in the SERPs because Google holds the page and domain in high regard for the keyword I typed in.
4. Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
Many content marketers not only utilize blogging in their content marketing strategy, they even prioritize it.
The content marketers that prioritize blogging get disproportionately better results than the ones that don’t.
One of the reasons why is because content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing tactics.
The other major reason why value-driven content such as blog articles see a much better ROI is because people are exposed to thousands of ads every day.
They’re annoyed by ads, they dislike them and they don’t trust them.
People do, however, go online and look for solutions to their problems and love it when they find a relevant blog post that helps us out.
When that happens, it certainly moves the needle in the right direction when it comes to purchasing decisions.
Not everyone will buy immediately.
Some might take note of the website that helped them out or subscribe to the email newsletter if they have an ongoing problem that’ll require coming back to a helpful resource.
The more times people see your blog content, the more likely they are to become a customer.
Which by definition increases the ROI of your blogging efforts.
5. The average conversion rate for a blog is 19%.
Conversion rates for content marketing, in general, are much higher (2.9% vs 0.5%) than the conversion rates of traditional marketing efforts.
Blogging for content marketing takes those conversion rates even higher.
Can you imagine what upping the conversion rates by a few percents would do for your business?
Most businesses would absolutely thrive under such conditions.
The reason blogging carries such high conversion rates is simple.
Through blogging, you can accurately target consumer segments and their pain points and deliver value in the form of relevant, comprehensive and consumer-centric articles.
This approach a) builds trust, b) demonstrates your expertise, and c) brings in qualified leads.
If you’re consistently providing value to your audience, it’s only natural that many of them will want to stick around and subscribe to your email newsletter and become a lead.
6. Long-form blog posts generate 9x more leads than short-form blog posts.
Comprehensiveness matters.
Long-form blog posts lend themselves really well to demonstrating expertise by covering topics extensively.
Through long-form content, there are a lot of opportunities to score what I call “A-HA points.”
“A-HA points” are moments when you manage to awe your audience by teaching them something they’ve not heard of before.
Those moments leave an impression on the consumer and they tend to feel gratitude towards the content creator.
If you immediately follow up with an opportunity for the consumer to subscribe to your content, you will capitalize on the good feelings “A-HA” moments created.
Do this consistently and your email lists will grow.
Long-form blog posts are powerful for another very simple fact.
They enable interested people in your audience to consume your content for longer.
And it’s a well-known fact that it takes time to build a relationship and trust with someone.
That’s why, for example, webinars are usually at least an hour long.
If someone reads a few of your long-form posts and spends like thirty minutes on your blog.
They will have made a connection with you as a content creator by getting familiar with your writing style and “voice.”
Check out my article on how to create comprehensive content.
7. 68% of marketers think blogging is more effective than two years ago.
Blogging is not losing steam.
It’s still very effective and worth your while.
Blogging is evolving, however.
The fierce competition in most niches is forcing content marketers to create high-quality content if they want to get to the top of the “Mount SERP.”
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Think of it this way, this is just creating a higher barrier of entry.
If you commit to creating high-quality content, you will leapfrog over your competition and spend more time on top.
You should take this statistic point with a grain of salt, though.
The marketers who feel like blogging is more effective than two years ago are probably feeling that way because they’re two years older and more experienced at what they do.
Another reason why marketers feel that way could be because of the compounding nature of blogging and content marketing at large.
This means that results come slowly over the span of months or even years, but they also happen exponentially.
Meaning, it’s hard to get the ball rolling and it might feel fruitless in the first year or even two sometimes.
This shouldn’t discourage you in any way.
If you’re a beginner, you can educate yourself and avoid some of the mistakes others had to overcome the hard way.
But avoid paralysis by analysis because action is key.
8. Almost 50% of marketers would focus on blogging if they started from scratch.
This statistic point shows how fundamental blogging is in the eyes of many content marketers.
It truly is perhaps the most important content marketing activity.
This doesn’t mean blogging is for everyone, however.
You should know yourself well enough to decide if writing is for you.
Perhaps the notion of writing long-form articles day in and day out makes you sick to your stomach.
But you feel at home when you’re in front of the camera.
In that case, double down on what you like and apply the same principles of content marketing to your video content.
It’ll work.
If you do end up committing to blogging, at least at first, you won’t regret it.
Even if you have been focusing your attention on some other type of content marketing, I don’t think it’s ever too late to start blogging.
If you have an audience to carry over to your blog, it’ll take off that much easier and faster.
9. Approximately, only 1 out of every 10 blog posts are what’s considered “compounding” posts.
Blogging is often described as a hit-and-miss game.
Every now and again, one of your posts will start bringing on disproportionally more traffic compared to the rest of your posts.
Those are what’s called “compounding” posts.
One compounding blog post generates as much traffic as six regular posts combined.
Compounding blog posts usually generate in the ballpark of 38% of all blog traffic.
Not every blog posts can become a compounding post, but you can attempt to write posts that have a chance of becoming compounding posts by:
- Writing evergreen content
- Offer actionable advice
- Ask ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ in the title
- Target topics with decent traffic potential
- Employ SEO best practices
A great tactic to boost posts to become compounding is updating the ones that are performing very well, but not exceptionally well.
What does this mean?
Let’s say one of your posts is doing very well and ends up in the rank 8 of the SERPs.
Google already demonstrated that it likes what you did in that post.
By thoroughly expanding it and adding more meat to the bone, so to speak, you can create a beastly post that Google will like even more.
Sprinkle in a few backlinks to the mix and your post could end up gaining a few more spots or even go all the way to the top of the SERPs.
10. Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get nearly 3.5x more traffic than those that publish 0-4 monthly.
I’m going to once again use the Tresnicmedia case study to illustrate a point.
Tresnicmedia published 50 articles in 5 weeks, or 35 days.
That’s 1.4 articles per day.
The company reports exceptional results from this publishing campaign.
This lines up with what content publishers of similar publishing frequency usually report.
According to this research, 67% of the bloggers who publish the content daily report “strong results.”
The same research indicates that there’s a point of diminishing returns as the percentage of bloggers who report “strong results” but publish content more than daily drops to just 46%.
Now, take this with a grain of salt because reporting back “strong results” does suggest a certain level of subjectivity in the evaluation.
But the data clearly suggests that bloggers are more satisfied with the results the more frequently they publish content up until their publishing frequency exceeds posting more than once a day.
There’s a huge size caveat to this, though.
Publishing content frequently won’t yield results if you’re not maintaining high-quality at the same time.
So, if you can produce one high-quality article per day, by all means, do it.
Or try getting as close to that mark as possible.
11. 29% of leading marketing professionals reuse and repurpose blog content.
To get the most out of your content, it’s a good idea to repurpose as much of it as you can.
Now, that doesn’t mean spamming duplicate content wherever you can.
Keep your domain clean and don’t have a lot of duplicate content on it.
But reusing your blog articles and posting them on your LinkedIn account is perfectly fine.
Just give Google a few days to index the content on your domain so the algorithm knows the content originated on your domain.
It’s also a good idea to look for opportunities to turn your other content into blog posts.
For example, transcribing podcasts and videos and editing them to create blog posts works great.
If you’re posting content on Quora, you can always expand on the answers you post there and create fully fleshed out blog posts.
The same goes for going the other way around and editing blog posts to fit your other content marketing channels.
For example, pulling key takeaways and important findings and posting them on social media is a great idea.
Likewise, if you’re creating images and graphics for your blog posts, you can use them in so many different ways.
Conclusion
Blogging has been proclaimed dead or dying over the years, but it’s still going strong.
This was a list of the most important blogging statistics for content marketers.
Key takeaways from this article are:
- The audience likes learning about businesses through articles
- Blogging is great for SEO of your business domain
- Blogging carries much better conversion rates and lead generation than traditional marketing efforts
- The more high-quality long-form content you publish, the better results you’ll get