Industry insiders have been forecasting the death of blogging as a way of making money for some time now. While it’s certainly true that it’s hard for independent bloggers to monetize their article writing hobbies these days, many companies are making more money than ever by using their blogs.
Contrary to what you might think, however, this isn’t because they’re attracting long-term readers.
In fact, the number of genuine human impressions for blogs might have fallen somewhat in the last few years. As traffic grows, however, blogs are becoming increasingly important for attracting bots. For example, one study found that human users bounce off blog pages at a rate of 75 percent, while bots have a 54 percent bounce rate.
This would suggest that blogging is still essential since it helps connect companies with good bots that will index their pages and help them appreciate search rankings.
These rankings are what help bring human customers into the fold.
Turning Automatic Impressions into Real Sales
Search engine and app indexing services pay the most attention to long text strings, which can be hard to find on a dedicated eCommerce site. That’s one of the biggest reasons that company-managed blogs are still worth it. Even if individuals aren’t necessarily reading blogs, they help draw attention to individual sites is reason enough to keep them going. Some in the industry have even opined that it might be time to expand them to some degree.
Proponents of enhancing existing company blogs actually point out that those who publish around 16 posts each month get around 4½ times as many leads as those who post once a week. Some of the most vocal also focus on how the posts themselves may encourage lead generation seeing as 77 percent of people have continued to read blog posts despite the ubiquity of social media.
However, at least some of those who fall into this category are likely reading posts written by independent bloggers and have little interest in marketing text written to promote a specific brand.
Nevertheless, those interested in growing their company blog should continue to write every post as though a human were reading it. Search engine bots normally look for natural content. While they’re not anywhere as good as an actual human at telling whether or not a piece of text sounds natural, the more neatly you write your content, the better.
So clear and concise writing is vital, even when authoring marketing text that’s purely designed to promote a specific product or service. Keep everything sharp, and search engines will start to index the content.
Once they do, traffic should follow along. A few commentators have even suggested that this might be a good time for those who don’t have an existing blog to start one.
Creating a New Blog from Scratch
Considering the large focus on social media in the last few years, countless startup companies have never tried blog marketing in the past. However, since comparatively fewer consumers are likely to click on social media links and then transfer over to an eCommerce page due to them, it’s become important for these firms to create some article hosting platform if they didn’t have them before.
Unfortunately, that’s left an equally large number of small business owners wondering how to start a blog. Fortunately, it isn’t anywhere near as difficult as it sounds.
Installing a popular content management system, such as WordPress or the Ruby on Rails-based Alchemy is surprisingly easy. Anyone with any experience installing server updates should have no difficulty at all doing so.
Once they have it up and running, they should find that their advanced suites of editing features should make managing their posts just as easy. Figuring out what to write about is often the difficult part.
While it’s still important to do at least a little research on what keywords to rank for, you might want to throw out pretty much everything else that you’ve learned about search engine optimization.
Content is now truly king, and it matters more what you write than how you write it. However, they tend to look for copied content, so be sure to avoid reusing things on more than one outlet.
Though it might seem like yet another expense to add to your balance sheet, consider hiring a professional writer. Freelancers can be had fairly affordably these days, and working with one can often be a cost-effective way to manage your blog.
While it can take some time to really hit your stride, your blog may very well help to bring more traffic to your site than you would have ever thought possible.
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