Blogging for content marketing: how often, how long and how much time?

Business blog trends of 2015 based on research by Orbit Media Studios are captured in this post and infographic. How does your business blog compare?

Read the full article at: feldmancreative.com

Barry Feldman put together this great infographic based on the research that Andy Crestodina conducts every year to assess the state of blogging.

The trends from one year to another are interesting but what’s striking to me is the following:

1. Blogging for content marketing is time consuming:

To be in the sweet spot and stack up against competition, you need to publish 2-6 posts a week and invest 2.5 hours on average in each of them. That’s 5 to 15 hours per week:

• without counting related work such as distribution, promotion and success analysis;
• and it’s been increasing over last year.

How smart content marketers should address this:

Leverage lean content marketing techniques such as content curation or guest bloggers to supplement your own content with third-party content that answers your target audience’s questions (more details in our ebook: how to blog consistently in 30 minutes per day).

2. Business bloggers tend to “shoot and forget” (or publish and pray):

When you read the rest of the study by Andy, you see that most business bloggers are relying on “passive” distribution techniques: SEO and basic social distribution. Only a minority of them look for amplification through active promotion using email marketing, influencer outreach or paid promotion.

How smart content marketers should address this:

Plan to spend the same time distributing your content than you spend creating it. No time? Invest in software that helps you automate distribution and amplification through social and email marketing.

3. A lot of content marketers who blog are not yet data-driven:

• Content marketing KPI’s are not always clear;
• Google Analytics is only apparently simple: it takes a lot of work to configure it, maintain it and query it in the right way so you can get the results you want.

How smart content marketers should address this:

Focus on the right KPI’s for content marketing by tracking conversions at the granular post level. Find out the best tool to provide that report: here’s a comparison of 3 we put together for you.

At the end of the day, blogging is still the most accessible form of content marketing: it’s relatively simple to set up and get started. And out of all content marketing formats, in spite of a bias towards ebooks and gated content, it’s probably one of the most efficient for lead generation. But blogging for content marketing is also marathon: be prepared and get the right equipment!

Struggling with your own company’s blog? Read our ebook on how to blog consistently in 30 minutes per day or less.

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