Brand and Capture

The Impact of Blogging on Inbound Marketing

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Companies that blog have far better marketing results, according to a recent HubSpot study. Data showed that blogging regularly yielded 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages, which further enhance SEO results. This is all good news for inbound marketers, but can we get more specific about the impact of blogging on inbound marketing? From our own site, we can see several important trends.

1. Blog Days Are Good Days - In the charts above, the days we blogged during the last month are marked with numbers in the upper chart and blocks in the lower chart. Website page views, visitors and leads increase the day we publish and blog and usually stay up for a day following a blog post. We discount weekends and holidays since they tend to be slow days for (business) web interaction in general. If we slack off in our blog publishing schedule, traffic drops off proportionally. We also need to pay attention to the spikes in the data. These indicate an especially popular blog - based on a hot topic, great timing or an especially helpful resource for our readers. We will certainly adjust our blog topics and schedule to take advantage of these results.
2. Social Media Rules - The lower chart shows our highest proportion of website traffic comes from social media, especially on blog days. We promote our blogs on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, with the highest traffic coming from LinkedIn. The residual "day-after" traffic is primarily from LinkedIn, since it apparently takes longer for LinkedIn users to see and click-through on our blog post updates.
3. Organic Search Grows With Blogs - This is somewhat surprising, since there should be a lag between an increase in traffic and page views from a specific blog and any resulting improvement in Google page rank and keyword position.  It's not clear what the direct impact of blogging is on SEO in the short term, but the long-term effect indicates a general improvement across the board. Perhaps more importantly, when we slack off in our blogging efforts, all of our metrics suffer proportionally.

Conclusions

In looking at our own results and those of our inbound marketing clients, there is a direct correlation between blogging and inbound marketing results (both traffic and leads). The more often you blog, the better the results. There is also a synergistic effect between blogging and social media. Helpful blogs appeal to your social media community, and they reward you with higher traffic, comments and leads. Finally, our audience is clearly paying attention. They respond to good blogs and ignore bad ones. We listen to the data. It helps us to improve our inbound marketing strategy on the fly and build our business.