Blogging is Still a Good Complement for Your Small Business Web Site

Here is useful data from a recent study of over 1,500 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn't. It clearly demonstrated that companies with a blog have far better marketing results for their Web site. Specifically, the average company that blogs has: 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. We have certainly found this to be the case with our Darwin Awareness Engine Blog. Others seems find this benefit as well. In the past three years there was a steady increase in company blogs with a rise from 38% in 2008 to 45% in 2009 to 50% in 2010 as reported by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Kevin O’ Keefe offered some useful commentary on these results through his blog.  He pointed out that blogs help with search results. If your provide valuable content you will generates incoming links which supplies more traffic and even better search results. If your provide valuable content your blog will generate a social network for you. People regularly share posts from blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Twitter is my main source for finding out about what is happening on relevant blogs to my interests. I no longer have patience to sort through a RSS feed.  

Has Twitter changed these reasons to blog? I think that Twitter complements blogs and does not replace them. Here is a useful post by Adam Singer that goes into detail on this point, 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet. Twitter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into depth. As noted in this blog post, many of the most useful tweets contain links to blogs and other content that goes into more depth.

Adam notes: “Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.” I think these non-blogging Twitters are missing the chance to have a substantial conversation with their audience.

Case in point, the 19 reasons to keep blogging could not be conveyed in Twitter but the title should draw a lot of RTs and click throughs to the actual post. Which is better to be a RT pointer or the owner of the content where the reader ends up? I encourage you to check on Adam’s 19 reasons. I agree with all of them. Blog on.

 

Comments

[Ben Rotundo]

I would like to echo the sentiment of this article. I work for a car service noth of Boston and I blog about different happenings at Logan and in the transportation industry in general. Check it out below.

http://webbtransportation.wordpress.com/

[bill Ives]

Ben

Thanks. Great blog. Bill