SUMMARY: Seventy-seven percent of internet users read blogs and Internet users in the U.S. spend triple the amount of time on blogs as on email. So why aren’t brands blogging?
According to PR Daily:
- Companies that blog receive 97 percent more links to their website.
- Eighty-six percent of B2B companies are blogging.
- Half of the top 200 Fortune 500 companies have a corporate blog.
- Companies that blog generate 55 percent more website visitors.
- Seventy percent of consumers learn about a company through articles rather than ads.
- People read around 10 blog posts per day, but many read each post for 15 seconds or less.
- Forty-five percent of marketers say blogging is the most important component of their content strategy.
So why aren’t you blogging? I’ve done a lot of work with different CPG clients and the reason they don’t blog usually comes down to company culture. Their organizations aren’t set up for blogging or their processes prevent the implementation of a blog.
The other reason people don’t blog has to do with instant gratification. They expect a lot of traffic immediately when it can take months and even years to establish an audience.
This content that you are reading has an email list of over 10,000 people and I get over 100,000 page views via social media. It took me a long time to get this many readers, but I can sense what they’re hungry for by reading headlines and analyzing trending business stories.
If you want to start a blog, whether personal or branded, be prepared to experiment and fail at first. Know your audience and what they are hungry for and keep working with management to get it right. My advice? Speaks a person, not a public relations representative and stop trying to sell all the time. You’re writing to help people not sell them.
