Top Business Blogs - What Makes Them So Popular?

Anyone involved in small business marketing knows how difficult it is to run a blog. Developing an awesome blog with fantastic content that attracts loads of subscribers and readers means you need to be resourceful, creative and consistent – daily.

But with the challenges of blogging come plenty of benefits, usually in the form of leads, traffic and loyal fans who become customers. The main thing is to nail down the right strategy for publishing and promoting your content so your blog can grow into something superb.

What exactly is the right strategy for growing your blog?

Social Media

How Much Traffic is generated from Social Media?

First things first, how much traffic actually comes from social media? It turns out not a whole lot.

On average, the top 50 blogs get less than 7% of total traffic from social networks.

Wait! Don’t start ignoring social media just yet:

• There’s plenty to learn about your audience through social networks
• They’re the perfect place to connect and talk to your audience
• You can build personable relationships with your leads
• It’s great for promoting content
• You can get targeted with paid advertising which is ideal for small business marketing

Search

How much blog traffic is generated from search engines?

While a portion of the marketing industry is quick to proclaim the death of SEO, there are still plenty of successful blogs online that are seeing significant portions of their traffic floating in from organic searches.

Many of the top blogs are receiving noticeable amounts of traffic from search engines. In fact the top 10 business blogs out there have seen as much as 49% of traffic coming from search and blogs ranking in the top 11 – 50 have seen 46% of traffic arriving from search engines.

What is interesting to note at this point is how much more non-branded traffic the top blogs are getting now compared to previous years.

The bottom line here is to spend time devising a small business marketing and content strategy that can help you rank for non-branded keywords of the long-tail variety. Relying on traffic from branded searches only is somewhat blinkered and rather unlikely to result in blog success.

Now, what kind of content are the top blogs out there publishing to help increase their non-branded traffic so significantly?

Content

1. Which blog post formats seem to get the most social shares?

One of the best ways to build a successful blog is to teach people through content.

However, there are different ways you can format blog posts to teach people relevant, cool things.

So let’s look at what type of content, or blog post formats, seem to get the most social shares.

We used BuzzSumo to aggregate content from the top 10 business blogs into various types:

• “Why” posts
• List posts
• Infographic posts
• How-to posts
• “What” posts

What we found was that when it comes to social sharing, list posts seem to perform the best. Second in line are the how-to posts.

The key take-away here is that you should use your blog as a space to teach people relevant and interesting things and make use of content types that are easy to digest and easy to share. You can find more about different blog post formats here.

1. How often do the top 10 business blogs publish new posts?

Now, let’s take a look at the frequency at which the top business blogs publish their posts, compared to those blogs ranked 11 – 50.

We’ve already discussed how the top 10 posters have increased non-branded traffic this year. So just how wide is the gap on the volume of content they publish?

Apparently that gap is pretty wide.

In fact, the top 10 business blogs are publishing as many as 8 times more blog posts than those blogs ranked 11 – 50.

That is a massive difference in the frequency of published posts. What is interesting is that both groups are posting 6 – 7 times a day on Twitter and just twice a day on Facebook. However the frequency they post new content to the blogs is hugely different.

We all know that the quality of your content is important and should be discussed in your small business marketing strategy. But content volume is equally important.

The blogs that ranked inside the top 10 seem to have scaled their content efforts to a much greater scale and the benefits are clearly evident in the size of their audience on social media as well as the massive increases in non-branded traffic.

The big lesson here is you need to be doing your best to publish new, quality, blog posts as often as you can even if that means refreshing or repurposing content you have already published.

Get Some Help

Small business marketing can be extremely daunting and the thought of managing your social media and content strategies is overwhelming.

Rosy Marketing can help! Book your free consult today.