Business Blogging & The Problem With An Instant Gratification Society

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Instant gratification is becoming an ingrained expectation in everything we do. We want to results, and we want them now. If that latest Facebook post doesn’t have at least a few likes in the first few minutes, we wonder what’s wrong. We expect to have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips.

Sometimes that expectation for immediate results clouds our judgment of the success of other endeavors, including marketing techniques. While a limited-time coupon sent to email subscribers is likely to bring customers through the door in short order, other marketing efforts need more time to gain momentum.

Blogging is one of those efforts. Think of your marketing tactics as plants in a garden. Coupons, limited offers, and events are the fast-growing annual flowers that bloom big and showy, but don’t last long. Your social media presence is the raspberry bush that takes a bit longer to grow to maturity, but produces fruit (website visitors) throughout the season.

Your business blog is an apple tree. You may not see much in the first few months, or even the first year, but the payoff will extend long beyond that first year of tender loving care.

Your blog is an apple tree. You may not see much at first but the payoff will extend long beyond that first year.

Why should I keep blogging?

Yes, business blogging requires commitment of time and resources in order to do it well. It isn’t a one-off campaign to blast your target market and get a lot of attention that quickly fades when the “next big thing” comes along.

You can expect building your business blog to lose a bit of its excitement as you plug away. But it is precisely that consistency that gives business blogging two of its greatest benefits for your long-term marketing success:

1. Consistent business blogging builds SEO momentum.

Individually, each blog post you publish provides an additional opportunity to incorporate the keywords your customers are using when they search for solutions to their problems. Each little bit helps. But when taken collectively, all of those posts give search engines a complete picture of what your website and blog are all about.

Each new blog post is also an additional page for your business website. HubSpot’s survey of more than 7,000 businesses shows a direct correlation between the number of pages on a business website, the amount of traffic the site receives, and the number of leads the site generates.

Companies with 51-100 website pages generated 48 percent more traffic that those with fewer than 50 pages. Make it a thousand pages, and the traffic generated increases nearly 10 times. Maybe you aren’t ready to write a thousand blog posts, but how about one a week? That would add more than 50 pages in a year, potentially driving a significant increase in website traffic.

Enhance your blog’s SEO ability even more by following the guidelines in our Blog Essentials Checklist and the suggestions in our On-Page SEO Planning Template.

2. Consistent business blogging establishes authority.

Your business blog should be filled with useful, useable information about the topics that matter most to your prospects and customers. As they find a continual supply of reliable information, industry insights, or useable online tools, prospects and even media contacts will come to rely on your company as an expert.

Your blog should be filled with useful information about the topics that matter to your prospects and customers.

So who will they trust when they are looking for a vendor that can meet their needs? The company that has been giving them great advice and information all along.

Business blogging success story: HubSpot

Inbound marketing software leader HubSpot has built not only its own success, but the success of its customers, around inbound marketing and business blogging. But its success isn’t because each blog post instantly attracts huge amounts of traffic and leads.

HubSpot points out that one benefit of blog posts is that they have staying power to continue to attract website visitors and leads long after they are initially published. In fact, the company states in this blog post that 70 percent of the traffic on its marketing blog comes from posts that are more than a month old. The story is even more striking when you look at the lead generation power of “evergreen” blog posts: 90 percent of leads come from posts published in previous months or even years.

Today, HubSpot has more than 11,500 customers, 1,900 partners (including JONES), and millions of fans. But it didn’t happen overnight.

Business blogging success story: Primaris

Another of JONES’ partners, Primaris, has also seen its blog steadily grow website traffic and lead generation.

When Primaris initially began using a business blog in earnest in January 2015, readership the first month was 1,800. That grew to 2,000 in February, but stalled out for the next few months. While it was still far beyond the 50 or fewer hits when the company’s blog was largely inactive, it could have been easy for Primaris to decide that it wasn’t growing enough to continue.

Thankfully, they didn’t make the mistake of giving up. By the end of 2015, Primaris was welcoming an average of 3,600 readers per month to its business blog, with lead generation of more than 1,100 new contacts by the end of the year — nearly 3 times the number leads from the first six months.

Read more about how JONES helped Primaris successfully implement inbound marketing and blogging to launch into the commercial health care market. Download the case study here.

Business blogging is a long-term approach to building your website traffic, online lead generation, search engine rankings and industry authority. Don’t make the mistake of expecting overnight success and giving up too soon.

There are 14 more common business blogging mistakes (and the easy fixes) outlined in this ebook. Download it today and start business blogging the right way.