Ever wonder just how big the market is in the “Blogosphere”? I knew it was big but when I say this graphic by Infographiclabs, I could not believe how big it actually is.

State Of The Blogosphere 2010

Companies should Blog

We get the question all the time – “Should we have a company blog?” We always say yes and explain all the benefits of having a blog. But were our recommendations correct, real and able to be backed up by hard figures that showed the benefits of a company having a blog? We wanted to know.

Recently, we began looking at the metrics of companies that have a blog verses ones that don’t and were quite amazed with the statistics. Blogging is showing to be a benefit to businesses that sell to consumers (B2C) as well as businesses that focus sales to other businesses (B2B).

As we suspected, there is a dramatic increase in monthly leads for businesses that blog and sell to consumers. But we were surprised with the amount of median monthly leads that businesses selling to other businesses benefited from blogging as well. This is a strong indicator that B2B should have a blogging presence.

But what social media channels are most effective whether your business focuses on B2B or B2C? As suspected, the businesses that focus on consumer are having great success using Facebook and business to business companies have more success using LinkedIn, which is more of a business oriented network. But both B2B and B2C companies have the second most success in acquiring customers using a company blog.

The next question we get a lot is how often to blog. While we feel it is up to the business owners how often they think their blog needs updating, we wanted to see how often businesses were blogging. According to HubSpot, the sweet spot for blogging has been posting weekly, with more businesses doing it this year than last. And a lot of businesses are posting 2-3 times a week.

The data is clear, whether you are a company focusing on B2B or B2C, having a company blog is a great way to attract leads and customers.

I have been noticing that lately I have been spending a majority of my free time on my facebook page and my twitter account and not writing too much on my blog here. While it is important to expand your reach into new and existing networks, you also do not want to let you home base, in this case my blog go stale (actually, InnoGage has a great product called InnoBlogs that wont allow for blogs to go stale, a MUST for business blogging!)

I saw this video by Darren Rouse of ProBlogger and he talks about exactly what was happening to me. I was not spending time in my core or my blog, as he puts it, but was spending a lot of time in my outposts.

While it is important to connect in these outposts, it is also a good idea to build your core business blog or web site as well. He gives a great overview of how this works, as well as some other tips for building your own social media networking strategy. He gives a real example of a business he created and building relationships with similar sites.

If you are looking to build a successful social media networking strategy, I suggest you take a look at this video. Darren Rouse is the master of blogging!

When writing content for your company blog, make sure your content is Rich in your Niche and that you keep posting frequently. What is meant by this is you should write about what you do most of the time, your expertise, your

Rich in your Niche

service, giving advice to your followers. For instance, I like to put up post in areas where my clients seem to be stuck or I see an area that needs further explanation in the field of business development and social media marketing. I will rarely write about how to re-pot your daisy’s or paint the fender of a 1998 Acura. Keep writing about your niche, why you are in business.

Another point is to write frequently. I know I am guilty of this myself, as the days seem to fly by and I do not post as much as I would like. But this is where setting an hour a week to read something new in your industry then write a post about it may be handy. Your doing two things at once, learning and sharing. Just remember, a stale blog is worse than no blog at all. Itdoes not look good for you and your business.

This is a very simple and through video for beginners to Wordpress blogs that One World Social Media creates for their clients. I suggest all beginners watch this 8 minute video to get the basics of writing blog posts. Since you will be doing this quite often, it is very important for you to learn how to do this and do it correctly.

Good Luck and Happy Blogging!

p6yde5kz2g