A blog story: Increasing website visitors in just one month

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We finally convinced one of our clients to start a small business blog on his website, which is aimed at small business owners. He had hesitated for quite some time, but after a bit of convincing and after he did his own research, he decided to jump in wholeheartedly. For the month of April, he wrote one blog entry for each weekday.

The results? In just one month, they’re quite considerable. Comparing the month of April to the month of March, we’ve seen:

Pageviews increase from 62 to 1,328
Visitors looking at more than 7 pages per visit compared to 1.6
Visitors spending more than 8 minutes on his site compared to 56 seconds
Bounce rate (the number of people who look at his front page and leave immediately) down more than 30 percent

A lot of business owners are like our client. They don’t see the benefit of a blog for reaching small business decision makers, but the increase in traffic gets your site in front of a lot more eyeballs, translating over time into more sales. Think your blog wouldn’t be that interesting if you write about floor finishing, carpet cleaning or restaurant sales? Think again. Short, interesting posts can bring you traffic and keep your potential customers on your site, looking around, far better than just about anything else.

We tell people that search engines like blogs. In this case, our client’s blog performed better than paid advertising, bringing in 47 hits from Google compared to just 6 the previous month. Those new folks are staying around, too, averaging more than 4.5 minutes on the site (the previous 6 had stayed an average of 16 seconds).

If you don’t have a blog, and you’re not using it to full advantage, you may be missing out on a relatively easy way to bring in new customers online.

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