Here at NoBull Marketing we’re great believers in blogging. We believe it’s essential for content marketing and SEO. Even more than that, it’s a fantastic way to build trust with members of your target market, which is how they end up becoming clients.
So we’ve compiled the most important and interesting blogging statistics into an infographic. Here it is!
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<p><strong>Please include attribution to https://nobullmarketing.com.au/ with this graphic.</strong><br /><br /><a href=’https://nobullmarketing.com.au/blogging-statistics-infographic/’><img src=’https://nobullmarketing.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/blogging-statistics-infographic.png’ alt=’Blogging Statistics’ width=’1200′ border=’0′ /></a></p>
Let’s have a look at some of those blogging statistics in more detail.
The growth of blogging
Blogging has exploded in the last 30 years. Back in 1999, there were only 23 blogs on the internet. Now there are more than 600 million. Of course that includes blogging-as-a-business blogs (supported by advertising or affiliate links) and labour-of-love blogs (which don’t make money for their owners at all) as well as blogs which promote businesses. But there are still thousands (maybe millions) of businesses running blogs.
To give some idea of how important blogging is, the most profitable blog of all – Huffington Post – has an annual revenue of US$ 600 million. We’re not targeting that sort of result for our clients, but we are looking to see improved SEO and content marketing for them.
Blogging and SEO
A whopping 82% of marketers think that new content is the best way to drive SEO.
It makes sense. A small business site without a blog will probably have less than 10 pages. A home page, an about page, a contact page and a few service pages. But if you add a blog, you’re adding new content regularly, and the total number of pages on your site goes up incredibly. With more pages, you naturally have more pages indexed by Google.
Note that you also get on average 97% more links. Now, how many links you get depends on how good your content is, and how well you promote it. But it’s a safe bet that people are more likely to link to an interesting blog post than to a page selling your product or services!
Blogging and content marketing
All those pages and links lead to an increase in website traffic. The research says you can have an increase of up to 2000% – and we know that’s true. In the 18 months from January 2020, when we started blogging twice a month, every month, we saw a 3123% increase in our website traffic.
But content marketing is about more than just website traffic. It’s about getting the right traffic, and then moving those visitors along the buyer journey so that they eventually become customers. That’s why we love the statistics showing that having a blog can deliver you 67% more leads each month and improve your ROI by 13 times.
Why are blogs so effective? For a start, they’re not ads! No surprise that 70% of people prefer articles rather than ads. (Actually, it is a surprise – you’d expect it to be 90% or more.) Blog are also very popular, with just over 3 in every 4 internet users reading at least one blog. The vast majority of those readers 68.5% of all users) say that simply having a blog makes your site more credible. Remember how content marketing works on building trust, and you can see why blogs are so important.
Blogs are hard work and time-consuming
Unfortunately, the best things in business aren’t free! It’s hard to create quality blog content – and quality is a must! Quality is the top rated success factor for all bloggers – and ensuring consistent quality is a challenge for 38% of them. So when you sit there wondering what to blog about and how to make it interesting, you’re not alone!
What about the time it takes to blog? That’s one of the questions Orbit Media ask every year, and the average time to create a post goes up every year. In 2020, the average blog post took 3 hours and 55 minutes to put together. That’s a lot of time! The best posts in terms of results took even longer – over 6 hours! Successful blogging is a serious commitment. No wonder nearly two thirds of B2B companies with a blog outsource it.
You’d expect reading to take less time than writing, but you might not realise how much less. While lots of people read blogs, the majority skim. The average time spent on a blog is just 37 seconds. That means you need over 500 readers per post to get more time spent reading than creating.
Looked at another way, those ‘average’ figures don’t really matter. CXL report that blogs have a bounce rate of 65%-90%. It’s the one in 10 or one in 3 who stay and read that you care about. They’re the ones who are interested, who sign up for your newsletter, or call you, or fill in your contact form.
B2B blogging
If you’re marketing to other businesses, you get more joy from your blog. The number of readers may be lower, but each reader will commit more time. B2B buyers spend 5 to 10 minutes reading a blog post – and three quarters of them will share that post with colleagues. Why? The business buying decision is often a shared one, and it has to be justified. What better way to persuade your colleagues than by sharing helpful, informative articles?
So there’s a great opportunity in blogging, especially if you focus on education and information rather than selling. If you can build trust by answering questions and sharing your expertise, that goes a long way towards your content marketing goals.
How long should your blog be?
There is no perfect length for a blog. The statistics show that.
Most readers – 75% of them – want a short blog of less than 1000 words. Just over half of bloggers give them what they want. The rest write longer pieces – and get more results from it! Social sharing is greatest for blogs of 1000 to 2000 words, while SEO benefit peaks between 2000 and 3000 words. As for backlinks, the general trend is that the more you write, the more you get.
In the end, we say that a blog needs to be as long as it needs to be. It depends on what material you have to cover in that blog. At NoBull Marketing, we don’t write to a particular length. We write about what we have to say. Just remember, A very short blog is probably not going to get you a lot of business unless you’re Seth Godin. The rule of thumb is to have more than 600 words, even when you’re keeping it short.
Getting a return from your investment in blogging
The first thing to be clear about is that blogging is not a short term thing. Several years ago HubSpot identified that traffic only really starts to grow once you have 24 or more posts. That’s about how long it took us to see an impact too. Just like one guest doesn’t make a party, one post doesn’t make a blog!
When you add together the time taken to produce each blog post with the number you need, you can see why many business owners outsource. Just make sure that whoever you choose to help with your blog is producing quality content, because poor content will destroy your credibility with at least a quarter of your readers.
There are a couple more areas to consider to get more value:
Promotion is important
We’ve said it before. Content marketing is about marketing as much as it’s about content. Promote your blog via
- social media
- optimising it for SEO
- emailing your database
- and even asking influencers in your network to comment or share
While social media is the most popular way to promote blogs, using influencers seems to be the most effective. But we’d suggest using all these methods and more. (Check out our content promotion checklist for more ideas.)
Add some magic ingredients
Words alone don’t cut it. You need images. You can also add research and statistics to give your post more authority. (Just make sure you check your sources – we did!) And asking for quotes from contributors and experts is a great way to get them to share afterwards.
If you’re feeling really brave, add some video. It doesn’t need to be a vlog, you can just have a few posts with video. This seems to get positive results.
Re-use your content
It took so long to put your quality content together. So make sure you get the most out of it! Options include:
- additional social media posts
- guest posts based on a part of a longer post you’ve put together
- compiling several related posts into a downloadable ebook or resource
Consider updating posts too. Maybe you have additional research, or something in the market has changed.
A great example of this is our list of Australian business directories, which we research every year or two and update. The list is always changing, and we want the data to the most current and the most complete.
Summing up
As you can see, there are a lot of statistics available about blogging. But don’t get lost in the numbers. The core elements are quite simple:
- quality
- consistency
- optimisation
- promotion
- variety
If you can deliver on those, your blog will deliver for you. (And if you need help, you know who to ask!)
We don’t have the resources in-house to research all these aspects of blogging, but we’d like to acknowledge the following sources, which we have checked.
https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/03/a-brief-history-of-blogging/
https://growthbadger.com/blog-stats/
https://www.targetinternet.com/our-analysis-of-10-top-paid-bloggers-2020/
https://optinmonster.com/blogging-statistics/
https://www.ryrob.com/blogging-statistics/#blog-ranking
https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic
https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/study-shows-business-blogging-leads-to-55-more-website-visitors.aspx?_ga=2.227054165.911468166.1586729501-1582690004.1559596502
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NEOMG_Whitepaper_final_11-10-15_lk.pdf
https://thewestprogram.com/blog/505/blogging-statistics/
https://socialmarketingwriting.com/how-to-build-a-credible-blog/
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/study-shows-business-blogging-leads-to-55-more-website-visitors.aspx?_ga=2.227054165.911468166.1586729501-1582690004.1559596502
https://www.omnicoreagency.com/digital-marketing-statistics/
https://optinmonster.com/40-ways-to-repurpose-blog-content/
https://www.demandgenreport.com/
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/10/success-differentiators-b2b-research/
https://www.demandgenreport.com/
https://optinmonster.com/how-to-measure-content-marketing-roi-metrics/
http://www.curata.com/blog/generate-more-leads-with-data-driven-content-marketing/
https://contently.com/2019/01/14/mid-range-blog-post/
https://backlinko.com/content-study
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/historical-blog-seo-conversion-optimization
https://aryxe.com/the-most-important-factors-for-blogging-success/
https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/computers/how-build-credible-blog-infographic
https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogging-statistics/
https://expresswriters.com/blogging-statistics/
https://www.myoptimind.com/digital-marketing-statistics/
https://optinmonster.com/proven-copywriting-templates-formulas-ultimate-list/
https://trafficgenerationcafe.com/how-blogging-increases-lead-generation/
https://www.zazzlemedia.co.uk/blog/the-state-of-seo-2019-has-landed/
https://www.ryrob.com/blogging-statistics/#average-length
https://www.ryrob.com/blogging-statistics/#optimal-length
