This is certainly true and important to do.

Now this is very useful data to show to clients that refuse to start blogging :)

That is huge! It's great to have data to show clients the importance of blogging and a web presence. Even for local type companies, have recognition online always helps and leads to more and more opportunities later on down the road.

It would be interesting to know how many of the small businesses polled offer a product versus provide a service. Does it even matter? Maybe not, if the blog peaks the interest of the targeted audience.

So, How did you define blogging in your article?  
 
Is blogging one post a day? ten posts a day? one post a month?  
 
Just curious what the average is over your list.

@The SME SEO, these are all HubSpot customers, so you can assume that they are all legitimate companies, publishing quality content on their indexed pages. You can assume that the inbound links are non-spam links that have a normal distribution of authority.

@Scott We had a very minimal definition of blogging; they simply had to have blog software installed and more than one post written. Obviously, this is a very low bar. I suspect that if we had had a more rigorous definition of blogging, we would have found that there is an even great benefit to blogging than we reported here.

I agree with both sets of comments coming in. Great news, we all know that blogging can significantly help small businesses in their online marketing. I also agree that the numbers are too generalized for real meaning. Too many variables play into the success of blog, to related the very nature of blogging being the only contributing factor. That said, good numbers to begin with :-)

This is really good! I knew it was true, but it's great to see some stats. It'd be great to see what affect the increased traffic had on their sales. After all, it's all about the conversation...

Ooops, Auto fill maimed my link... 
 
This is really good! I knew it was true, but it's great to see some stats. It'd be great to see what affect the increased traffic had on their sales. After all, it's all about the conversation...

Thank you for the research. I can use this in my listing presentations. I am a Residential Real Estate Agent and using blogs has helped me a lot with my business!

Thanks for the update on who the blog is. Its still good research to know. I have the same anecdotal evidence but nothing concrete like this.

Thanks for that, some extra motivation for me to finally do some regular blogging.  
 
What do you think about the causation/correlation thing here? Are sites that blog getting more visitors because they blog? Or are more serious sites doing more blogging? 
 
Sean

In my own experience, taking blogging very seriously has opened up opportunities that I didn't even know existed. When I started blogging for business, I thought that it might be too limiting as a sales and marketing resource. Boy was I wrong!!! Not only did blogging not limit me, but it opened up opportunities that were previously closed to me due to limited resources. I've been amazed by what I can do with a blog; market research, engage prospects and customers, and even close sales. I could go and on, but suffice it to say that I'm also certainly not surprised by these numbers.

Great post - interesting statistics. It's good to finally have some tangible statistics to back up what we have been saying for a long time.

Blogs for Business drive traffic and links, but my major takeaway is their power in establishing your brand as an authority and building trust/relationships on an increasingly crowded Social Web.

As a small business, we can vouch that we have seen the same results becuase of the blog that we have recently started. Great information.

Blog is really the best source to expand and promote business. 

Fascinating - and I found your research of great interest. However, can one draw cause and effect? What if it's the case that those who blog a) conduct better SEO work; b) conduct more effective PPC campaigns; c) send out more e-alerts; d) have more content; e) all of the above? In other words, could this be an example of correlation instead of causation?

I,m newbies in blogging but I,m trying to learn.Thanks for your info.

Hey Rick, interesting post and interesting data. Thanks for taking the time to put it together. 
 
My question/comment is along the same lines as Sean's. You did a good job not implying blogging CAUSES 55% more visitors, though I'm sure a lot of readers will infer that. It could be that companies that blog are on average bigger. Or have a better reputation. Or on average they put more effort into search marketing. Right?

@Paul, @Sean really good question -- and one I tried to avoid answering in the post. The short answer is I don't know, but I suspect there is a causal relationship. I haven't done enough research to provide a better answer. I'll be working on that over the next few weeks, but, as the Economist noted this week, proving a causal relationship is not easy: http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14210799

I find it funny and amusing to listen or better yet read the limitations people put on a simple starter set of stats. 
 
It all has to start somewhere and now that you have give your contrasts and questions there is more fodder for more complete surveys. 
 
WHoo hoo, I love starting, taking action is key then rest will follow.

An interesting observation. I doubt that this is necessarily a direct causal relationship. I imagine that companies with blogs are more digitally savvy - so the traffic is probably generated by a range of techniques - including blogging.

Rick, what exactly are the date ranges from the data above? You show great numbers, but did it take 6-8 months for companies to achieve them? I am curious to see if the numbers are immediate for blogging, or if they take time to reap the benefits. I am guessing the latter.

Thanks for sharing the stats, it's good to see you're looking for ways to prove the effectiveness of blogs. However, I'm not sure you can actually draw any conclusions from this sample. There are lots of variables that could be affecting those numbers - ecommerce vs non ecommerce sites, different types of blog content, how the blog/site is being promoted (ie twitter, email marketing, paid promotion, SEO)etc. Without ruling out the impact of other factors, you can't directly correlate 55% more visitors to a blog.

The conclusions that you draw from these numbers are born out by my experience. Quibbling is fun, but common sense is often the beat interpreter of data. 
 
Thanks for your good work.

(This is a fun post) I have some different interpretations. 
 
 
 
Companies that have a lot of site visitors tend to start blogging. 
 
 
 
Blogs tend to increase fluff visits and have little effect on the bottom line, other than draining marketing resources into writing blog entries. 
 
 
 
Blogs that are about blogging tend to attract a lot of commenters whose main purpose is really to get another link to their own blog out there. 
 
 
 
The blog community perpetuates itself. The average consumer is relatively untouched. 
 

Interesting stats. I would love to see more detail on the companies that blog and what they are doing to achieve the positive results.

I have been told in no uncertain terms thoughout the week that church marketers are either not interested and / or don't know how to use these church marketing blogs I post or they use these church marketing website blogs with a passion. 
 
 
 
My church marketing website is obviously being used by the latter group and isn't it being used considerably. (Yet still most people read the blogs but don't engage with a personal or professional comment... yet! Wouldn't it be wonderful if this could change eventually.) 
 
 
 
I hope these church marketing blogs on my site are of assistance to our church marketers as each blog gathers its own momentum.  
 

This is a tough one to get any real and above-all meaningful stats out of but I believe it's fairly representative. 
 
The stats infer that by simply creating a blog you can generate more site traffic and get a greater number of leads. 
 
I prefer to view adding a blog to a client site as only part of the picture. The client has to make a commitment to doing some serious linkbuilding and on top of this, actually create blog posts that encourage linking and add to that site's authority. 
 
That said, these stats are good enough for me to use as a means of persuading my clients of the potential validity of adding a blog to their array of marketing tools...I would make sure any client I was working with was aware of the work involved to make it genuinely worth getting into though.

Great, with this article I was able to convince my boss of starting our own blog! :)

The whole blog concept and operation has grown so rapidly that businesses without this option will be disadvantaged. School marketing now benefits considerably from this marketing option. I am beginning to hear that schools with this school marketing option are benfitting from a particular demographic interesting in blogs.

who in small business has time to blog anyway?...

Thanks for this info. Now maybe my clients will believe me when I tell them to blog. Charts never lie.

It's businesses in the U.S. and Canada.

this is tru,,this is the way should be..

Thank you for this post and for giving us all who try to encourage small to medium-sized business to blog more ammunition.

Lots of companies start off well with blogging but realistically struggle to keep it updated. There are ways around this. If you are interested in discussing, message me @laurajhannan

Does this count as blogging or leaving a comment? 
 
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