Some Amaz­ing Blog­ging Sta­tis­tics in 2012 (So Far)

Blog­ging is big. Just how big, you ask? Well, con­sider these num­bers from Busi​ness2​Com​mu​nity​.com:

  • Social media sites and blogs reach 80% of all U.S. inter­net users. (Mind­jumpers)
  • Social net­works and blogs account for 23% of all time spent online — twice as much as gam­ing. (Mind­jumpers)
  • “Increased fre­quency of blog­ging cor­re­lates with increased cus­tomer acqui­si­tion, accord­ing to…HubSpot. 92% of of blog users who posted mul­ti­ple times a day acquired a cus­tomer through their blog, a fig­ure that decreased to 66% for those who blogged monthly and 43% for those who posted less than monthly.” (Mar­ket­ing Charts)
  • The most pop­u­lar fre­quency for blog post­ing is weekly (60% of blog­gers). Just 10% post daily. (Mar­ket­ing Charts)
  • Blogs are the sin­gle most impor­tant inbound mar­ket­ing tool. “When asked to rank the impor­tance of the ser­vices they use, 25% of users rated their com­pany blog as crit­i­cal to their busi­ness, while a fur­ther 56% con­sid­ered them either impor­tant (34%) or use­ful (22%)” for a total of 81%. (Mar­ket­ing Charts)
  • B2B com­pa­nies with blogs gen­er­ate 67% more leads per month on aver­age than non-blogging firms. (Social Media B2B)
  • For those look­ing to out­source, a pro­fes­sional con­sul­tant will gen­er­ally charge $1,000-$3,000 for set­ting up a blog, $1,000-$3,000 per month for ongo­ing con­tent development/editing, and ball­park of $200 for a sin­gle guest post. (Mack Col­lier)
  • 57% of B2B mar­keters say SEO has the biggest impact on their lead gen­er­a­tion goals. (Mind­jumpers)

And, as far as Con­tent Mar­ket­ing goes:

  • Though half of all b2b dig­i­tal spend­ing is focused on search and most web­sites are organ­i­cally opti­mized, only 65% of b2b mar­keters have ever used pay-per-click adver­tis­ing. (BtoB Mag­a­zine)
  • Search pro­vides the high­est qual­ity leads. Accord­ing to research by Hub­Spot, “SEO leads have a 15% close rate, on par with the close rate for direct traf­fic, and ahead of refer­rals (9%), paid search (7%), social media (4%), and out­bound leads (2%).” (Mar­ket­ing Charts)
  • 90% of b2b mar­keters do some form of con­tent mar­ket­ing. 26% of b2b mar­ket­ing bud­gets are invested in con­tent, and 60% of b2b mar­keters say they plan to spend more on con­tent mar­ket­ing in the com­ing year. (Smart Insights)
  • The most pop­u­lar con­tent mar­ket­ing tac­tics used by b2b mar­keters are arti­cle post­ing (used by 79% of b2b mar­keters), social media exclud­ing blogs (74%), blogs (65%) and enewslet­ters (63%). Just 10% use vir­tual con­fer­ences. (Smart Insights)
  • The aver­age cost to gen­er­ate a lead through inbound mar­ket­ing ($143) is about half the aver­age for out­bound mar­ket­ing ($373). (Econ­sul­tancy)
  • Small busi­nesses, on aver­age, spend twice the share of their lead gen­er­a­tion bud­get (43%) on inbound mar­ket­ing as do large com­pa­nies (21%). Small orga­ni­a­tions spend more than twice as much on social media and 3X as much on blog­ging as their larger coun­ter­parts, while big busi­nesses spend three times as much on trade shows and nearly twice the share of their bud­get on direct mail as do smaller firms. (Econ­sul­tancy)
  • More is (often at least) bet­ter. Busi­nesses with 40+ dif­fer­ent land­ing pages/offers gen­er­ate 10X more leads than those with five or fewer land­ing pages, and those with 200 or more total blog posts gen­er­ate 3.5X more leads than those whose blogs have 20 or fewer posts. (Econ­sul­tancy)
  • 84% of b2b com­pa­nies are using some form of social media mar­ket­ing. How­ever, “best in class” com­pa­nies gen­er­ate over 3X their share of all leads (17% vs. 5%) from social media as do aver­age per­form­ing com­pa­nies. (Mar­ket­ing­Profs)
  • 90% of b2b mar­keters are doing some form of con­tent mar­ket­ing, and b2b mar­keters spend on aver­age 26% of their mar­ket­ing bud­gets on con­tent. The most effec­tive con­tent mar­keters spend twice as much as their less effec­tive peers on con­tent devel­op­ment, and con­sider buy­ing stage when devel­op­ing con­tent. (B2B Mar­ket­ing Insider)
  • It shouldn’t be a sur­prise, but con­tent has to be good in order to be effec­tive. B2b buy­ers say that less than half of ven­dor con­tent is use­ful – and ven­dors who pro­duce such low-value con­tent are 27% less likely to be con­sid­ered and 40% less likely to win the busi­ness. “Good” con­tent is con­cise, enter­tain­ing (includes sto­ries), more edu­ca­tional than pro­mo­tional, and is con­tex­tu­ally per­son­al­ized. (B2B Mar­ket­ing Insider)

It seems with those rates, I should be charg­ing for my advice! Nah.…I like help­ing you for free too much! I can’t wait to see what the future of blog­ging holds.
Read more at http://​www​.busi​ness2​com​mu​nity​.com/​s​o​c​i​a​l​-​m​e​d​i​a​/​7​2​-​f​a​s​c​i​n​a​t​i​n​g​-​s​o​c​i​a​l​-​m​e​d​i​a​-​m​a​r​k​e​t​i​n​g​-​f​a​c​t​s​-​a​n​d​-​s​t​a​t​i​s​t​i​c​s​-​f​o​r​-​2​012 – 0229237#ms78QiC8gb1mleVj.99