Do you ever wonder if all of this hoopla about blogging is worthwhile? Have you been thinking about blogging, but in reality you just can’t quite answer the “Why Blog” question with enough conviction to move you from theory to action? Well, I just want to take a few short moments to encourage you the best way I know how…with our story.
Here at the Bubble we do marketing for a living. We know blogging matters and we even blog for some of our clients who see the value but don’t have the bandwidth to do the writing. Even so, like plumbers with bad pipes, we really had a hard time making the commitment to blog. All of us in the office, including me, had an easy time saying to the CEO that he should blog and that yes, indeed it matters. Having said that we did nothing much to encourage or assist him beyond that.
Things are gonna change!
Then came the mandate from our CEO. We will be a company that posts blogs. We will practice what we preach. We will be able to answer the “why blog” question with data from our own story, not just the stories of others. We will take the key step beyond the knowledge of blogging as a good thing to the discipline of actually blogging. We will become our own test case for the impact of blogging on website traffic and rankings. He will no longer be the only provider of content. No, everyone will get involved. We will become a company committed to blogging!
Things are a-changing!
And we have. Below is a simple chart showing our website visitors in April, May and June. To put things in perspective, over the last couple of years we have averaged between 400-500 visitors to our website each month. Below represents 819 visitors in April, 1,331 in May, and 2,017 in June! Yes, it’s okay if you celebrate with me! I am celebrating for sure. We were at 1,977 on Sunday the 30th as I was drafting this blog post but alas Sundays are slow days so I wasn’t sure we would break through! If you’re thinking to yourself that I could just hit our website myself 23 times, then you must understand that our own IP addresses are blocked from the reporting so that wouldn’t help!
This chart represents nearly a 400% growth in our traffic.
The color coding chart looks like this:
So out of the 2,017 visits in June, well over 50% of the visits are from organic searches, that oh so coveted arena that says that people are searching for what you are writing about! Ah the bliss of the inbound/content marketing approach.
What changed? We got serious about blogging!
How serious was it you ask? Well, between 2008 and 2012 the Half a Bubble Out blog delivered exactly 37 total blogs, that’s less than 8 posts per year.
- From January 2013 – March 2013 our contribution totaled 19 blog posts
- In April 2013 we upped the contribution to 19 blog posts in just that month
- In May 2013 we got serious and committed as a team that we would post a minimum of 6 out of 7 days a week. We were enthusiastic in May and created 31 blog posts. The jump in traffic from 819 to 1,331 was encouraging and we moved into June.
- In June 2013 we kept our commitment of 6-7 days and contributed 24 blog posts and we are committed to moving forward at this pace.
The jump in traffic from 1,331 to 2,017 just over the last month is more than enough encouragement for us to keep moving forward.
Early Successes only?
If you’re a cynic you might think that we are celebrating too early, and perhaps you are right, but celebrating we are! We believe in celebrating successes as they happen and allowing those successes to encourage and inspire future success for both ourselves and our clients. We invite you to watch with us and see where it goes. Better yet, we invite you to make the decision for yourself. Stop asking the question “why blog” and start blogging! Increasing your web traffic is only one benefit of many to the discipline of writing and contributing what you know to the online world. For some other thoughts check out the infographic in my blog post entitled Why Your Blog SHOULD Be One in a Million in the Internet Marketing World or better yet, gain more encouragement from one of my co-workers who wrote Internet Marketing Tips: 3 Excuses Every Blogger Makes and offers ways to get around them and get moving forward.
Why blog? Bottom line…the numbers are crazy. I’m starting to risk thinking this stuff really does make a difference. Why Blog? Because people are looking for helpful information online and you can contribute, help them and grow your business at the same time. Isn’t it time you started?
