Blogging For Business: Lessons from the Ultimate Blog Challenge

One of the great things about blogging for business is you can chat away sharing your knowledge and it brings people to your website, mainly through long tail searches.  

What do I mean by long tail?

People often type in longer phrases into the search box, sometimes even whole questions.  

Many people dismiss this “accidental” traffic, but it’s often far more targeted than more competitive keywords. 

Needless to say, blogging is great for the long tail!

Hubspot found that businesses that blog average 55% more website visitors than those that don’t.  From experience, the more you blog, the more natural organic traffic you achieve.

Blogging for business is a long-term strategy that helps to increase trust, increase traffic and bring in new leads and clients.  It doesn’t bring in results overnight and works best when combined with an overall social media strategy.

The Ultimate Blog Challenge

This month, I’ve been taking part in the Ultimate Blog Challenge to complete 31 posts in 31 days and comment on other people’s blogs. 

I won’t complete this particular challenge, and that’s OK.  I knew it would be a tough one this month, and I have blogged far more than I expected! While I am flagging at the finish line, four posts behind and I am seeing a difference.

It’s worth remembering that I was taking part in the UBC to basically kick myself up the backside and remember to blog for my business.   I did it for the challenge of posting – and of course inspiration.  I know from my last challenge there are business bloggers out there, reading other points of view is always good!

Other than numbers coming to the blog, I can’t really compare stats with last month nor May as my cookie optin totally screwed my analytics.  So, percentages of new visits, bounce rate, pages visited, where they went next are all out. 

They’re just stats anyway – and stats aren’t results.

I can see that my organic traffic went up 16.2%, much of which was from long tail searches.  Facebook referred quite a bit, hardly surprising since I was posting in the UBC group.  Despite me often forgetting to tweet with the #blogboost tag, Twitter traffic went up too. 

Of course, I am seeing some traffic come from blog comments – even though I struggled to keep up with commenting!

I’ve gained three new clients directly related to my blogging and several enquiries.  I’ve also had mails from peers in similar lines of business from saying hi to possibilities of working together in the future.  My email list has increased by 22%.

Let’s not forget I have had my thoughts and perceptions challenged and learnt so much by reading other peoples blogs.  I’ve come away with points I can put into action to improve how I operate – and a raft of ideas and inspiration.

I do have many things I want to change with my set up here on My Local Business Online.  None of it is rocket science or even new – I just need to take more of my own advice! 

I’m disappointed I have not completed the Challenge, but it has highlighted again that blogging for business regularly can work well.  I need to streamline it more so what I blog about relates to the services I offer with a call to action and specific landing pages – I know this, don’t ask why I haven’t already done it!

My quest to get local businesses blogging (and using the Internet for their business) continues!

To all the UBC bloggers I’ve visited this month, thank you for the inspiration and interesting articles.  I hope you got as much out of it as I did – keep blogging! 

Whether you are taking part in UBC or not – thank you for stopping by my little home online.  If I can help you get your business blogging, simply get in touch 🙂