Study of 1500+ companies to compare blogging to websites without blogs:
Is blogging better for your business than a regular "static" website? What does better mean? For the purposes of this profile of blogging versus normal websites for business, better means more site visitors leading to more business. Hubspot, a provider of website and blog services, studied 1531 of their customers. 795 blogged, while 736 did not.
You get more site visitors if you blog:
The sites that blogged got 55% more visitors than those that did not. That's obviously a major goal, as those visitors should ultimately lead to marketing opportunity and sales. While a great many businesses spend money on SEO and PPC, it could be that their efforts would be far more productive if they blogged.
Inbound links are important, and you get more when you blog:
A whopping 97% more inbound links were found for sites that blogged than for those that did not. Remember that the search engines all attribute "authority" to sites based on the number of links from other sites coming in. With almost double the number of incoming links for sites with blogs, you can't argue that these sites would fare better in the search engines. Here's another case for re-channeling resources from SEO and PPC into blogging.
Pages and information get found by searchers:
Obviously, the more information on a site relevant to your business, the more likely a visitor from a search on keywords and phrases related to those pages. And, if this study hasn't convinced you yet, here's a major item: 434% more indexed pages are on sites that blog than on those that do not! The reasons are obvious, as it's far easier to create a new article and post it up on a blog than on a website. And, blogging leads to frequent and relevant posts about your business.
If you're not blogging, this study should get your attention:
All of the points made here relate to any business, but a real estate professional should be extremely interested in these results. With more than 80% of home buyers and sellers using the Internet for real estate searches, we simply cannot ignore the importance of an effective web presence.
All of the time you're spending relating instructions to a website programmer, or worse yet, building your own pages and doing your own site design, could be far more valuable to you in writing blog posts. The 434% more indexed pages tells the story. It's obviously easier for a business person who blogs to get a lot more content up on the site than it is for those who deal with regular websites. And, "content is king."
If you're not blogging, start now. If you're blogging, but not posting regularly several times a week, pick up the pace. If you are, enjoy your future business.
