John Hayden of Inbound Zombie started his company by growing the readership of his blog. He shares some great insight with the guys over at HubSpot for their Inbound Now series of videos.

John even shares some specific information about his blog grew over time and how his work on the blog initially continues benefiting his business today.

Let’s expand on what John had to share.

Building a Business Through Blogging

John now receives half of his new business through search.

That’s half of his business from people searching for terms in search engines and coming across his content. That is where the power of blogging lies. When you create content targeted at the interests of your customers you are building a path for people to find you. And the best part of this strategy is you’re giving people the chance to opt-in to your business via your content. You don’t have to push anything on them. You simply provide knowledge, insight, and useful information and the people come to you when they perform the task of searching.

Frequency

I write about frequency a lot on this blog. It’s important – in my experience – to the success of a blog. John mentions that his original strategy was to post three times a week. For a lot of businesses that is a big commitment. For anyone, in fact, that’s a big commitment. I’ve seen many blogs start out with similar goals and they are able to maintain that frequency for a time, but after a while the posting drops off and before you know it there is only a trickle of posts coming in.

The payoff is in the incoming links, the mentions, the notices, and of course the traffic and sales that come from all of these. As a whole, the blogging strategy works well for businesses to generate revenue especially for B2B companies.

What about Business to Consumer Companies?

My thought is blogging is more of a tool for business to business companies…for the immediate time frame.

Businesses targeted businesses seem to be better able to bring in traffic that converts to sales leads. For whatever reason consumers simply have preferred channels that lean on the traditional marketing channels like catalog, email, and retail. There has been a huge shift to natural search for consumers and blogging is certainly a part of that.

The key for B2B companies is to realize that others in your industry are probably already having success with a blogging strategy. When will you develop a strategy to keep up?

For B2C companies the key is to develop a strategy today so you can be ahead of the game when consumers start shifting more of their effort online. It’s already happening. Just because it’s not the preferred channel now doesn’t mean it won’t be tomorrow.