Just two weeks ago, I blogged about the real value of B2B blogging and today I want to revisit the topic after seeing an interesting phenomenon in one of my blogs.
It’s one of my personal blogs but it still illustrates a point. See, in the blog in question (not this one!), I’ve been stacked up this week and failed to post. Imagine my surprise, though, to pop into my web statistics and discover a great week of visitations anyway.
Here's why. Although it may be a bit gauche, but let me quote myself in what I said in my article The Real Value of B2B Blogging.
Here’s the cool thing about blogging, though. It’s like compound interest. You have to invest for a while but once you build a critical mass, then the value of blogging compounds – into higher search engine rankings with more pages which means more folks can find your company and its products.
Even though I’m a bit behind on posts for this particular personal blog, I still pulled in visitors from search engines because of the growing library of articles that are getting ranking in organic searches.
December 9, 2008 update: On the personal blog in question, I actually went about a month without posting. However, that search engine critical mass really hit home and my visitors have continued to climb anyway. Now, imagine how much higher visitations will continue to climb now that I'm back to blogging.
To stay with the compound interest metaphor, here’s what can happen.
Imagine if you open a savings account and make some deposits and then stop. You still earn interest on the amount just sitting in your account. With your blog, if you build up a library of articles and then stop posting, you still have some opportunity to continue to attract visitors and this ability will continue to grow as individual articles continue to gain page ranking.
Now imagine scenario two. You open that savings account and you make regular deposits. That means you have more dollars available to earn interest and you snare higher values of compound interest because of it. That means your assets grow faster because of the combo of your deposits and more interest dollars.
With your blog, if you continue making regular posts, you have new content for search engines to spider (and social media sites to discover). However, you still have your archived posts out there snaring attention and gaining page rankings. That translates into higher visitations.
Once you have the visitations, though, then the next step is to find avenues to convert those visitors into some revenue-related value. And that is a subject for another blog post.
Summary
To summarize, don’t expect blogging to gain you immediate results. However, do expect blogging to start off slow and then gradually build momentum as you gain page rankings and build audience for your content. It takes time to build B2B authority in your market niche but it can pay off if you do it well.
For example, I mentioned that in my Value of B2B Blogging article that blogging is a strategy I’m employing as part of my Intellicore Design marketing initiatives. It’s a progressive build for us but, largely through blogging in combination with some other no-cost emarketing initiatives, we’re building traffic to our blog and main websites.
More importantly, the content seems to be compelling enough for folks to visit multiple pages in our sites to learn more about us and some of them are contacting us to learn more.
Blogging is going to work well for some companies and be less effective for others. Feel free to contact me to discuss whether blogging (or some other community solution for that matter) would work effectively for your company.
Stories from the trenches are also welcome from other folks B2B blogging.