Should you have a blog?

Hubspot have recently published some interesting research and observations that they have made from their customer base about blogging and whether it is useful for small and medium size businesses.

Commenters (or is it commentators?!) on the Hubspot post ask whether the results are just correlation rather than causation, i.e. are those companies that are blogging more likely to be more focused on using the web as a marketing tool anyway, which would increase traffic. I would agree with that to a certain extent but I certainly get traffic spikes when I publish a post, which says to me that there is some causal stuff going on too.

Hubspots results show that the companies in their research who are blogging:

get 55% more visitors to their websites

have 97% more inbound links

have 434% more indexed pages

What does that mean?

More visitors gives you more people to convert into customers (assuming they are from your target market – and that depends on what you are blogging about!); more inbound links gives you more authority in the eyes of the search engines, which makes your site more likely to come up in searches; more indexed pages gives you more opportunity to be found in the search engines through the sheer volume of your available content if nothing else.

Consider whether you could have (and add content to!) a blog

If you’re not blogging maybe you should think about; it’s not for everyone though – you do have to actually write regularly on the blog otherwise there’s no point! But you could delegate or outsource it if you really can’t do it. It’s better coming from you or whoever on your team that has the right voice for your prospects and customers but properly briefed writing on your blog from a copywriter / ghostwriter could be almost as useful (and you could always use their writing as a starting point to edit it to be from you anyway).

Does blogging work for me?

I have to put my hand up at this stage and say that I know that blogging has definitely increased traffic to all of my websites and specifically to the Hythe Handbook and Counterpoint Networking sites. They were originally static sites and although I did implement blogs on them through the hosting company I didn’t really make too much effort to keep them ‘fresh’. Since moving to WordPress sites I have systematically set up to blog regularly on those sites and the resulting traffic shows me that it is helpful in driving traffic.

Obviously, though, the next step once you have the traffic is to ensure that you are converting it into paying customers!