The Secret to Increasing Blog Subscribers & Boosting Traffic [Data]

The Secret to Increasing Blog Subscribers & Boosting Traffic [Data]:from HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog by Chris Kukstis

It probably won't come as a surprise to you that business blogging is an indispensable component to seeing success with inbound marketing. You need content to appear in search results, generate page views, and increase your brand equity as a thought leader.
But did you know that the frequency with which you blog also has a direct impact on the amount of subscribers and email traffic you receive? That's right ... the best blogs keep readers coming back, and encourage readers to become subscribers, adding them to that all-important contacts list. We took a look at 720 HubSpot customers with at least 50 email subscribers to get a better idea of how these businesses use their blog to attract and convert prospects. Here's what we found ...

The Proof is in the Pudding

What we found suggests that the secret to attracting and growing active, lead-producing subscription lists is not much of a secret at all: post content as often as possible. Take a look for yourself:

Over a two-month span, businesses that published blog entries on a regular basis (more than once a week) added subscribers over twice as fast as those companies that added content once a month. These subscribers are a key asset to your business -- a list of contacts so interested in your perspective that they want to be alerted every time you produce new content. That's a list I'd like to grow as quickly as possible so I can nurture those subscribers into qualified leads and, eventually, convert them into customers.
Having a high subscriber growth rate is also vital for another reason ... it helps you bring those fans of yours back to your website so they can actually complete a conversion event! No matter how much someone loves your content, it's not easy to remember to visit your blog every day to read it. But those revisits are the only way you can drive the reconversions you need to move subscribers further down the funnel. Take a look at the correlation between blogging frequency, and the amount of email-driven site traffic that's driven per subscriber:

High-volume bloggers enjoy a return of just over .2 email-driven site visits for each of their subscribers -- or in less abstract terms, business that blog regularly (again, more than once a week) and have, say, 50 subscribers would receive 10 email-driven site visits per week. That's huge compared to just one measly site visit that businesses blogging just once a month would expect to receive. That's 9 more opportunities to convert subscribers into leads and customers, all from just keeping up your business blog.
Subscribers are an essential component to your contacts database, because they're an audience interested in you for your knowledge and thought-leadership. They trust you! And people that trust you make really, really awesome customers. So, how do you attract more of them? Blog regularly. And how do you get the most marketing mileage out of them? Blog regularly.
Do you put any effort into growing your subscriber base? How big of a role does frequent blogging play in that effort?
Image credit: Mike Licht