80 percent of business blog traffic comes from first-time visitors, according to a recent survey of corporate blogging and social media trends by US-based Compendium.
The survey, which gathered data from 266 US companies about blogging traffic, visitor trends and Twitter usage, seems to pooh-pooh the idea that business blogs have a major group of loyal readers.
What this means for your business blog?
80 percent is a pretty high figure and seems to imply that the business blogs surveyed aren’t doing enough to make readers come back for more.
Without knowing what strategies these blogs are using, it’s pretty hard to assess their performance. But if you check your own data and see that you’re getting something similar, you might want to take a look at the kind of approach you’re taking to your business blog.
For example;
- Are you updating daily?
- Does your blog have personality?
- Can readers connect with the person or people writing the blog?
- Are comments actively encouraged?
Even a business blog needs regular updates that tell a visitor that this is an active community. If I’m a first time visitor to a B2B blog and see that the last update was over a week ago, chances are I’m not going to add it to my RSS or subscribe. I tend to value bloggers that are continually engaging
5 Reasons Your Business Blog is Failing
Another turn off for many business blogs is that they just don’t have any personality. Blogging, by its nature, is more personal and conversational in tone. It shouldn’t use the same kind of corporate speak that your website uses. Brendon Sinclair, for example, is a great business blogger, who oozes personality and has a genuine swagger to his writing.
Business blogs also need to work hard to create a sense of community by encouraging comments and promoting discussion. A business blog that has the comments turned off or worse, ignores comments, is a real turn off.
Track your data
Now would certainly be a good time to start tracking your data if you’re doing so already to identify what is and what isn’t working with your business blog (I recommend Google Analytics, which is free). Data is a great way of helping you figure out what you can do to engage your audience even more.
For example, do you know what kind of posts are generating comments or leading to sign-ups of your RSS feed?
Another option is to look more closely at what (if any?) conversions your blog is generating. Are people opting into your newsletter? Downloading ebooks or other material? Or are they just leaving, never to return?
Proactive business blogging
Don’t just sit back. Take a closer look at your traffic and if not enough people are sticking around and coming back for more, try different ways to hook them in and make your blog sticky.
This might mean changing the person in your organisation who blogs for you, bringing in an outside blogger to help spice the blog up or generate more frequent posts, or radically overhauling the design, tone and approach.
No matter what you do, before changing anything read business blogs in your industry that clearly have a large audience that return and comment and engage. Look at them critically and analytically and try and identify what they’re doing that brings people back again compared to you.
What Do You Think?
What other strategies can we add to business blogging to generate return visitors and grow connections? Or doesn’t it matter if you’re attracting a majority of new visitors?
Update: Mark W. Schaefer has an excellent piece discussing the same report that’s worth checking out: Wait a minute. It’s not about engagement after all!
Image: Flickr
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I guess we took different approaches with this! I bascially advocated — don;t fight the trends, re-think the whole strategy. This would be a fascinating topic at the local pub wouldn't it? : )
Thanks for the great post, Jon!
I just wrote a guest post about this topic for someone else and took a slightly different angle. I quoted you again so you should see the post in your trackbacks. Not sure when it will go online.
Be good to chat about this stuff any time you're in Sweden !