How much do you really have to write for people to pay attention to you?
The short answer is a lot, but not as much as you might think. If you were to take a peek at the back ends of the most popular blogs’ content management systems, you would likely see thousands of posts. You would see posts covering a large cross-section of topics within their niches and a carefully crafted SEO strategy that focuses on quality content that humans — not search engines — want to read. But let’s just focus on the volume for now.
The obvious argument is understood: “I can hire somebody to blog for my business a few times a week, but I can’t afford to pay for multiple posts a day.” Good news: You don’t have to. You’re not out to compete with the biggest blogs. You just want to boost revenue.
According to a new study by HubSpot, businesses that increased the number of blog posts to 15 or more per month saw five times more web traffic than those which published less. If 15 times per month is still a little much, the same study found that blogs that received new content 9 to 15 times per month saw three times as much traffic.
If the idea of producing thousands of posts is intimidating, the HubSpot survey will make you feel better. It found that increasing the total number of published posts to just 200 resulted in a 59 percent increase in traffic. Regardless of your business, a near 60-percent increase in just about anything positive is reason for celebration.
Here’s one more finding to motivate you: Once you reach that 200-post mark, you’re likely to generate five times as many sales leads as you did in the days of having a dozen posts.
If this were still the 20th century and you were pouring advertising dollars into print ads, how much would you pay to increase foot traffic by 60 percent? How much would you to pay to see a fivefold increase in the number of sales calls you receive?
Business owners have priorities farther up their list than writing for their blog, but this new research proves that committing some of your budget to hiring somebody to write for your blog is money well spent.
You don’t have to reach the 1,000-post mark to be effective. Once you start blogging, it won’t take long before you start to see definitive increases in your traffic, which will likely mean more leads and more revenue. The ROI for a quality blog producer is higher than you thought.