This summer, one of the executives at a company that’s been a client of mine for several years questioned the wisdom in having a company blog. He thought it was driving very little traffic to the main website and that it was receiving few visits itself.
I hopped onto Google Analytics, and I discovered a few things. Here’s a screenshot of all the referrers to my client’s site during a 30-day period this summer:
First of all, the Twitter links are almost exclusively links to blog posts, since I use the Tweetily wordpress plugin to tweet out from their 350+ blog posts at regular intervals.
What we see then is that the blog actually accounts for 38% of the referral traffic to the main website. In fact, it’s the most popular referrer of traffic to the site, beating out even internal referring links. The blog also accounts for 30% of new users, the second largest source, after the main site itself.
Notice also that Facebook, Pinterest, and the company’s newsletter archive—all of which I manage—are the next most popular sources of traffic to the main site. I should point out that while the newsletter traffic seems low, this is for archive traffic only. It doesn’t include email traffic, which is actually included in the “Blog” traffic, since the newsletter is designed to drive traffic to the blog.
Combined, all the inbound marketing I provide for the client accounts for 65% of all their website traffic and 60% of all their new users. Clearly, my inbound marketing efforts are paying off (at least by the measurement of driving traffic to the company website).
In case you’re wondering, this client invested in my Traffic Driver Picoso and Social Media Picoso packages, both of which are designed to increase engagement and provide a better value for your dollar.
So how did I do it?
I publish two blog posts every week using attractive titles and on topics I know the target market is looking for. This creates fresh content to draw people to the blog and increases the blog’s SEO because it has organic text rich with keywords related to the client’s industry. I combine that with sharing the blog posts on social media (their accounts total over 45,000 followers) and through the biweekly newsletter, which in the last 4 years has grown to over 7,000 subscribers.
If you’re interested in driving more traffic to your website, ask me about my traffic driver and social media packages.
