With the average blog taking three hours and sixteen minutes to write, you’d like to think it’s being read by more than just your team members and your Mum, right? If your stats aren’t where they should be, or you’ve set yourself some goals for 2017, here’s some slick advice we’ve gathered together from a recent study. The study was carried out by the brains at Media Orbit who know how to dissect a topic and spell it out with fast stats. Here’s what we found valuable from their study in terms of creating a winning blog.
In our minds, you want three things for your blog. You want potential clients to read it. You want them to share it. You want them to subscribe to it. Say it with me: Read, Share, Subscribe. With this in mind, let’s delve into some stats which have been compiled from a study of 1000 bloggers over the past few years.
Here’s what we learnt:
Time and effort
Time and effort counts. According to the study, those who reported strong results spent more than six hours per post, meanwhile only 23% of bloggers who spent less time reported strong results.
On average we learnt that a blog takes 3 hours to write – an increase of more than 25% year on year. This tells us that blogs are not simply mind-dumps of information. These need to be planned, well thought-out, proof read by a peer, and then edited to make the final copy perfect before posting. It’s serious business!
Length and format
While the whole “skim reading” trend still plays a role when bloggers sit down to their laptops, trends are telling us that shorter posts are actually on the decline by a whopping 50%. The length of blog posts is up by 19% with an average of just over 1000 words per post. Quality and quantity is on the up, so don’t be afraid to post long articles.
Frequency
While many bloggers took on the task of daily blogging in the past two years, this is actually down by 50%. On the other end of the spectrum, some strong bloggers are publishing monthly – this trend increased by almost a third, while the most popular bloggers are blogging just weekly. We think weekly is a great middle ground. Give yourself time to really think about your topics, collate statistics, expert quotes if there’s a place for them, and avoid burn out!
One thing we truly believe, is that if you have a blog, don’t let the last post be from 2014! If you can’t keep up the posting, either hide it temporarily, or bring on a copywriter. If your blog looks seriously out-of-date, your clients will wonder if the business is still active.
Content promotion
When it comes to promoting your writing, social is top dog – not surprisingly. More than 95% are promoting themselves via social media. Furthermore, bloggers are getting savvier when it comes to SEO. If you’re looking to learn more about optimising your content we can help!
We also noted that the SEO motivated bloggers are the ones writing longer posts AND these bloggers are also utilising email to communicate their content. Again, if you’re thinking about sharing your blog via email, we can get you started!
Measurement
While most bloggers can tell if their post has been successful simply by collating the number of likes and shares across social media, there’s a shift towards truly utilising analytics, with more than 50% focusing on their stats for each post.
The information provided in your blog’s analytics can really help you define what your audience wants to read from you. It’s certainly worth getting your head around if you want to get serious about blogging for profit. We can assist you with all and any questions you have about this.
Need some help starting, or improving your blog? We can set you up with everything you need – all you need to do is log in and start blogging! Contact us to chat!
