With marketing and advertising constantly evolving, is a tactic as simple as blogging still relevant? According to a survey conducted by Orbit Media Studios to get insight on 1000+ business bloggers, the answer is yes! Over the four years, they have conducted this study, a clear theme has been established – bloggers are being rewarded for their content marketing efforts. Almost 30% of respondents have reported that they experience “strong results” towards their goals from their blog posts, whether that’s increasing traffic to their website or increasing the time spent on a page. (You can check out all of their findings in this study.) Blogging, when done right, can help position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Your audience will trust what you have to say and will follow each post to learn more.
At Texas Creative, we can confirm these findings with the results of our own blogging efforts. In June of 2017, we revamped our blog efforts by having a different member of our team write a post each week, and the results have been incredible! We have seen a significant increase in traffic to our website including sessions, users, and page views, with sessions increasing by almost 60% as compared to the previous seven months. We have also noticed a spike in traffic to our website, specifically on the day that we post each week. Throughout this process, we have picked up on some useful tips that help a blog post get more traffic:
#1 High-value content is key
We have an incredible web team at Texas Creative, and we know that our clients and other developers really like to hear from them. The posts that have come from our web team almost always get the highest number of shares and page views. These posts are usually very instructional and solve common problems that the audience might have also experienced. For example, the most shared and viewed blog that we have was written by the head of our web team, Art Williams, titled “3 Tips for Client Friendly Paragraphs in Drupal 8”. Art’s blog has over 2,300 page views and an average time of 8:18 on the page. Try to find the topics that your audience is interested in, and be sure to focus on those topics for the majority of your posts. Providing relevant and useful information for your target audience can make all the difference.
#2 Link, link, link!
Linking to different articles or blogs is vital not only because they can help connect your topic to related sources, but also because in our experience, it has proven to significantly increase the time spent on a particular blog. For example, Josh Norman, one of our creative directors, wrote a blog titled “Avoiding a Fontastrophe: Why you should never ask your agency to send fonts to you” in which he linked to 10 outside sources. While his blog was posted almost two years ago, it still has a much higher average time spent than any other blog post we have—almost 16 minutes on average!
#3 Headlines, text styling, and writing style
Catchy headlines are the first thing that will entice a reader to open your blog and take a peek. They are arguably one of the most important criteria for a blog because no matter how interesting the copy is, without an interesting headline, the blog may never even be opened. Beyond the headline, writing in short sentences and paragraphs, along with using bulleted points can really help keep a reader’s attention. Another one of our highest traffic blogs was written by one of our account managers, Rebecca Kellogg, titled “Drupal and Wordpress and Joomla, Oh My!”. Along with a catchy title, this blog is structured in multiple smaller paragraphs and sections.
To sum it up, blogging is here to stay. And, with the right approach, it can be a really effective way to drive more traffic to your website or to meet other business goals you may have. The blogs mentioned in this post aren’t the only great blogs we have written! Check out the rest of our posts. Or, if you have any additional tips for writing killer blog posts, please share them in the comments below!