An important item for us at GBW is how long it takes for a blog and a blog post to start generating results.
One advantage with blogging compared to a marketing strategy like advertising is that a blog post is always online, generating traffic.
That’s compared to an advertisement, which is only online as long as you keep the money flowing.
But unlike an advertisement, which generates traffic almost immediately, a blog takes longer.
Here is our experience with how long it takes to generate results with a blog at GBW.
6 Months Until Regular Organic Search Traffic
A general rule of thumb is that it will take 6 months for your blog to start generating traffic.
If you post a single post, it will take 6 months for that post to start showing up in some organic search results. If you publish weekly posts, you’ll start noticing that they start to bring in traffic six months after publication, usually from long tail keyword phrases.
This sentiment was shared by Neil Patel in a post he did on his guest posting efforts:
If you decide to guest-post, be prepared to do it at least once a week for a period of six months or longer. You can’t expect great results from a few posts.
It really is a numbers game. When I first started guest-posting, I was hoping for great results, but my efforts drove little to no signups. I also didn’t see any improvement with my branding.
If you continue posting for a year, you’ll notice that business will start rolling in because the content you published six months ago will start ranking really well in the search engines.
That’s about what you’ll see with your own blog.
Get Traffic Sooner With The Right Promotion
You can increase your overall traffic with each post and you can get traffic sooner with promotion.
It obviously takes time to build an audience on social media, but you can build your audience by sharing posts and using industry hashtags. You can reply to people and help them with questions as well.
With an audience, you can send immediate traffic to your blog each time you share a post.
Another way to get traffic is to include references about brands and individuals in the posts you write. Then when you share those posts on social media, mention those that you included. Often times, they will re-share your post with their followers sending traffic to your post.
Here is a tip for sharing content on social media.
And are 3 posts that mentioned influencers and brands (and got lots of traffic):
- 10 Social Media Predictions From The Experts
- 10 Brands Using Twitter Without Promotions And Discounts
- 10 Big Brands With Great Blogs
Consistency Is Key
The big key to getting consistent traffic is to publish consistently on your blog.
The biggest issue with blogging is that people give up before they start getting traffic. It’s difficult to blog for 6 months without getting much traffic especially if you’re also building your social media presence.
But it’s worth your time to publish regular posts. We often publish weekly posts. After six months, that’s 25 posts that are always online, generating traffic for your business.
It takes time for the search engines to learn about your site and your content. They need to see what you’re about and they need to know that they can trust you in their search results.
It takes time to get people linking to your content and sharing your content. These are big signals that tell the engines that you can be trusted.
Conclusion
Blogging is a great marketing strategy for your business.
But you have to go in with the right mindset. You can’t expect things to start coming in right away. If you need immediate results then you’re better of going with advertising.
But if you’re looking to build equity in your website then you want to start blogging and you want to publish consistently.