OVERALL CONCLUSIONS: SURVEY & CASE STUDIES

THE SURVEY CONCLUSIONS

The survey respondents indicated that they believe there is a broad array of benefits to starting a blog including: quick publishing, thought leadership, building community, sales and online PR. We had a good cross section of bloggers, including 49% who have run their blog for over 7 months. The biggest concern about starting a blog was the time needed to devote to the blog; the next concern was legal liability. A slight majority of bloggers took less than 1-2 months to start their blog after initial management review. The most used blogging platforms by the bloggers were Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type.

Once they started, bloggers saw immediate results from publishing content & ideas quickly. Search engine rankings & links results appeared before sales. Overall, thought leadership and idea sharing were the biggest benefits for bloggers.

Timeline of results

• First week - publish ideas quickly, RSS syndication. Being able to publish content quickly and RSS syndication within the first week makes sense, as a blog's content management system makes it easy to set up and start publishing.
• First month - provide thought leadership, boost search engine rankings, & increase links.
• 2-3 months - interview requests and building a community happen now.

Over 83% of bloggers saw a traffic increase, while for 54% of respondents the blog represented less than 35% of their traffic. For 5% of bloggers their blog represented 100% of traffic.

Journalists contacted 59% of survey respondents. Less than half of bloggers received a published article from the contact. 18% of bloggers have experienced negative PR.

54% of 65 respondents stated they target keyword phrases in blog articles to achieve higher search engine rankings. Respondents stated 'providing their blog as a place to write about issues' was their most important search engine optimization issue. Also receiving more qualified traffic through search engines, and increasing the number of links to boost ranking were important issues.

The roles of bloggers include; President (45%), head of department (33%), and staff (22%). Most bloggers, (73%), were from companies with 1-100 employees, however 19% had over 500 employees. The majority of bloggers were from small companies, 74% had less than $50 million revenue, while 11% had over $1.4 billion. Blogging innovation is coming from small companies and large companies alike, including several technology industry leaders.

Industries are diverse but weighted towards software, tech, marketing, consumer-packaged goods, and manufacturing.

Most bloggers were over the age of 30. The biggest age bracket was 30-39. Respondents were highly educated with 52% having achieved an undergraduate degree and 48% having attained a graduate level, and lastly 77% were male and 23% were female.