Large and small business owners want results - fast results. When they spend a dollar on “marketing or advertising” they want to see an immediate return on that investment. But with blogging for your business, you have to consider it an investment that won’t pay dividends immediately - but will garner rich rewards as it matures.

Talk to successful bloggers or content marketers and they’ll generally tell you similar statistics. Out of their hundreds or thousands of blog posts - only a small subset generate big traffic continuously. Usually, this falls somewhere along the lines of the old 80/20 rule - eighty percent of your traffic is derived from about twenty percent of your posts.

At Nuvonium, we have over 700 posts, and have been at this for many years - sharing our knowledge and experience. But consistently, the same few dozen posts float to the top of our analytics and receive the most traffic. Some of our most popular posts are over five years old (which is a lesson in writing “evergreen” content - but that’s a future post). Sometimes it’s hard to figure out which content will click before it does. But once you find a topic that’s interesting and generating traffic - you can build content that’s related around the original post - and capture more traffic. And more importantly - establish thought leadership and ultimately convert traffic into sales.

Owners and bean counters want results virtually overnight

The reality? It take months or years to build out your blog before it returns on your investment. Hopefully it happens sooner, but it’s important to control expectations. Blogging is a long-term strategy, not a short-term gain. Four hundred posts is the magic number that’s been touted as the tipping point. Though with the tidal wave of content generation it may take more today. But with 400 posts you’re bound to have between 5-10% that are generating traffic and converting.

So it’s a race to 400, right?

Sadly no, it’s not simply a numbers game. Your content has to be helpful and interesting too. You can’t simply spew garbage just so you can reach a magic number. If you’re publishing dreck, no one will read it or share it. And you’ll never achieve your magic 10-20% of posts that bring you traffic and conversions.

It can take 2-4 years

Unless your business has writing resources on staff or deep pockets, reaching four hundred or more posts can take four years or more. Which is a fact that’s unsettling to many business owners. But if you really want to create good content it can be a struggle to create more than 2 posts per week - and even that can be a stretch. Of course you can always outsource writing - but then you have to know you’ll get what you pay for - turn to affordable content mills and you’ll get mediocre content. But hire experience writers and you’ll be spending quite a bit - but in the long-run it will be a better investment. But it’s tough to stay the course when you’re spending regularly and can’t connect the dots to conversions immediately.

Keep investing and enjoy the eventual returns

Just like your 401k, it doesn’t pay out overnight. It takes constant, regular investment to have it grow. A business blog is the same. If you keep investing in it – creating good content – it will provide a return. It just might take more time than you expect. But then again, good things come to those who wait.