Your 2016 resolution: Write more blog content

January 19, 2016

Blog content is always one of things you know you should be doing more often, but it’s also one of the first things to be pushed aside when you get busy. It’s easy to say that you’ll get around to writing a new article tomorrow, but then tomorrow turns into next week and next week turns into next month. Next thing you know, it’s been months since anything has been published on your blog.

I’m here to tell you that your 2016 resolution should be to publish more articles on your blog on a more consistent basis.

Here’s why:

Content is fuel for your other marketing efforts

I’m sure you’ve come across the phrase, “Content is king.” While this really hammers home the importance of content, it doesn’t do much to explain why it’s so important. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of content is the role it plays across all of your marketing channels.

In general, having more content is going to make the rest of your marketing easier. By consistently publishing blog articles, you’ll always have content available for your email newsletters. Put a few related articles together with some extra design elements and you’ve got an ebook that can be used for lead generation with an advertising campaign.

Content should also be the center of your social media strategy. You’ll always have something worth sharing on your social profiles and you can even invest a little into social advertising to boost the reach of your best articles.

And of course, content can have a huge impact on SEO.

Content is a huge source of traffic

On the SEO side of things, each blog article represents an opportunity to optimize for more keywords that might be difficult to optimize for on a static page on your site. With blog posts, you typically dive deeper in topics allowing you to use more technical keywords and since each article is at least several hundred words, you have more chances to use a wide variety of keyword variations.

There might not be a ton of people searching for those keyword phrases, but people search for such a huge variety of keywords. The more you write and the more keyword variations you can optimize for, the more traffic you’ll potentially receive. Over time, each article adds up and you end up with a huge source of new traffic.

Here’s a look at organic traffic that has arrived on our blog on prontomarketing.com over the last few years.

We’ve gone from 26 organic blog visits in July 2012 to 2,274 organic blog visits in October 2015. That’s over an 8,000% increase over 3 years.

This doesn’t mean that you need to invest blogging for years to see results. Even just a few months worth of blog articles can have an impact on your traffic.

The graph below shows the same data as above but is narrowed down to July 2012 to January 2013.

We started getting serious about posting article to our blog on a regular basis at the end of 2012. Within a few months, we were already seeing huge improvements in our organic blog traffic.

This data also holds up for our clients. Below is a chart showing the average organic traffic landing on blog articles for clients enrolled in our Custom Blogging service.

Again, a sharp improvement in traffic can be seen shortly after the program has launched.

Unique blog content is absolutely one of the best investments you can make in the long term health and strength of your website.

Content leads to new business opportunities

One of the more difficult benefits of content to measure is its ability to put you in a position of authority within your industry. During every interaction a prospect has with your brand, they’re building an impression of your company, and with great blog content, you can ensure that you come across as an expert in your field.

In fact, 70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads. Blog content is a medium that is both trustworthy and educational. Over the years, we’ve had multiple business opportunities arise through content from new clients to new partnerships. Many of which initially reached out to us because of the expertise we displayed in our blog articles.