Darren Slaughter has published a compelling article: Why Blogging is Better than Advertising, where he outlines the reason contractors should make routine blogging a top priority.
He cites these HubSpot stastistics:
Using data collected in 2013, they have discovered some facts that many of us long suspected to be true.
- Companies with 51 or more blog entries receive 48% more traffic.
- Companies that blog 15 times each month receive 5 times more traffic than those with no blog.
- Blogging just 1-2 times each month generates 70% more sales leads than websites with no blog.
- Sales leads are doubled by increasing frequency of blog entries from 3-5 times per month to 6-8 times each month.
If you weren?t convinced by that gut feeling that told you blogging was a good idea, be convinced by the cold, hard numbers that prove it.
Obviously, as voting is under-way for the 2017 Best Construction Blog competition, I’ll agree that blogging has real value for contractors and should be a marketing priority.
Is it “better” than advertising, however?
Here, obviously I bear some conflict of interest — our business earns most of its revenue from advertising sales. Of course, these days, publishers don’t simply sell the advertising and say “thank you, goodbye” — we integrate the advertising with social media content, articles, and other promotional tools.
The big challenge for me is to wade through the several dozen offers I receive each week from outside services offering their content, sometimes for “free” (as if they are doing us a favour), but often for modest payments, which I almost always decline. Google frowns on the paid content (unless structured with no-follow status on the links) and in any case, it doesn’t seem right to give a significant amount of the value we offer advertisers paying several hundred dollars per ad without receiving a proportionate amount of revenue. (I advocate that contractors should be paid fairly for their work; and so it is right that publishers should be paid as well.) And it isn’t serving my interests to endorse Slaughter’s fee-paid blog writing services?if there is any sort of placement on my sites.)
Nevertheless, yes, you should blog and if you do, you can avail yourself of the attention, respect and relationship building that regular advertising doesn’t offer. And if you aren’t entered in this year’s Best Construction Blog competition, you can enter in 2018.
Below is?a live update on the voting results. You can cast your ballot here.
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