The fourth Friday is officially up for grabs at 834. Thus, Fourth Friday Free-for-All. You will hear from anyone and everyone — the guy that just put up our wallpaper (he knows a lot about customer service), to the people we talk to in restaurants (happy hour anyone?) and everyone in between. Have something you personally want to get off your chest or send off into the universe? Email ad******@*******gn.com and we’ll let you take a stab at it.
For our inaugural post, Kim Bode (our fearless leader) has a little message about blogging she’d like to reinforce for you below.
Listen up. I am only going to say this one more time, although this blog will live in the blogosphere for years and years as a valued piece of literature (obviously): Stop overthinking blogs!
A blog is not a research paper. It is also not 1,500 words. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be written (see: video, podcast or infographic). As firm bloglievers (like Beliebers, but way effin’ cooler and drastically less destructive or tattooed), we’ve heard too many times to count that four blogs a month is an outrageous expectation — staff is overloaded, there’s no time to spare, it’s not a priority and on and on and on. It appears our multiple blogs, newsletters, articles and social media posts about the importance of content generation has fallen on deaf ears.
Science… because science.Â
Here are a few eye-opening statistics from our friends at HubSpot that prove blogging is a far more valuable marketing tool than most companies understand:
- 46% of people read blogs more than once a day
- 79% of companies that have a blog reported a positive ROI for inbound marketing in 2013
- Marketers or companies who emphasize blogging are 13 times more likely to have increased ROI year-over-year
- Blogging is the top tool used by inbound marketers and therefore, companies utilizing these agencies (see graph below)
It is also important to note that inbound marketing (social media, blogging, email marketing, SEO) is significantly cheaper than traditional or outbound marketing (via Hubspot | State of Inbound Report | 2014). Blogging saves you money! (Gasps from the non-bloglievers). Even further, you can actually measure the effectiveness of blogging by checking shares, analytics and downloads.
The data doesn’t lie, folks. So now you have a choice: continue pouring marketing funds into $2,000-a-pop print ads or sit your ass down to write a 500-word blog that will reap 13 times the ROI for free. Hey, it’s up to you. We just write it and live it.
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