As I got up this morning and realized how long it’s been since I posted anything on my blogs, I realized that I really don’t like blogging. In fact, in some ways I absolutely hate it. So I’m started asking myself if blogging is really doing anything for my business, if there’s better activities I can employ, and if I should continue blogging.

I’ve spent the better part of the last week analyzing my business.

I’ve delved deeply into my stats, tracked where the revenue is coming from, and analyzed my websites and traffic. Here’s what I actually came up with.

1. The majority of my traffic is not coming from my blogs.

In fact, they are generating significantly less traffic and revenue than my SBI websites… like 70% less. Huge shocker for me. You see, I started blogging because it seemed to hold the promise of more traffic than traditional websites because of the constant pinging of your content from the blog updating services.

I’m a long time SBI’er (since 2002). I love SBI, but some aspects of the hosting service is a pain… like not having direct ftp access. So when blogging came out, I thought it would be great to have an easier content manager. Plus blogs held the promise of as much traffic as my SBI sites were bringing in.

I’ve totally dispelled that little myth… at least for my particular business.

2. Blogging is coming up short in all my niches.

This was another big surprise to me. As you probably already know, my business includes several other niches. I’ve been evaluating all my websites, not just the business oriented ones, and the blogs are losing.

In fact, I took a look at one niche where my SBI website and my blog were started at virtually the same time. That means that both sites were about the same age. In this case, I posted new content to the blog 3-5 times per week and I posted new content on the SBI site about once per week (several articles). The content was virtually the same, including the same keyword optimization.

SBI won again!

3. My blogs generally had a lower conversion rate.

My last criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of my blogs was to take a look at the revenue generated and the conversion rates. Again, my blogs came up short.

When I compared blogs and SBI websites, in non-business niches, the SBI websites averaged a 42% higher conversion rate. In my business related niches, the SBI websites converted an average of 67% more visitors into buyers than the blogs did.

4. My blogs convert fewer visitors into subscribers.

This one kind of goes along with the conversion rates above, but I thought it was worth mentioning. About 80% of my newsletter/ezine subscribers come from my SBI websites… not my blogs. Initially, I thought that made sense because they were probably subscribing to my rss feed instead.

Nope.

Visitors to my blog just aren’t bothering to subscribe at all.

I even compared a blog to a SBI site that had virtually the same layout with the same subscribe box in the same place on the page. SBI still converted over 80% more visitors into subscribers.

Why are my traditional websites out-performing my blogs?

This is the fundamental question that I’ve been asking myself since I started doing this in depth evaluation… why are my SBI websites out-performing my blogs by such a huge margin?

After all, the content on comparable sites is virtually the same (not duplicate content however). The age of the sites I compared was nearly identical. Keywords were used on both types of sites.

And yet, my SBI websites have far more traffic, a higher PR, higher sales conversions, and more subscriptions.

Why???

That’s when I started looking into the actual traffic that comes to both types of sites. Who are these people? What are they expecting when they visit?

At first, it was very frustrating because I thought they should be basically looking for the same things when they visit either type of site since the content is similar.

But that’s when it dawned on me.

Visitors have a vastly different expectation when they visit a blog than when they visit a traditional website.

1. Blog visitors expect to see frequent posts… usually daily. Visitors to blogs can see the date of all your posts, how long your blog has been around, and how many others have bothered to make comments about your posts. All of this puts your visitors in a particular mindset.

2. Blogs don’t carry the same weight as traditional websites because literally anybody can have a blog these days. If they’re not held in as high esteem, then it makes sense why they wouldn’t convert as well. Having a traditional website is a bit more complicated than a blog, therefore it seems more important in the eyes of visitors.

3. Blogs are much more about opinions and experiences than they are about pure information, so that’s what visitors expect to see. Therefore, if your blog posts are nothing but informational, you aren’t soliciting comments, engaging your visitors in your blog, or creating a following.

In other words, the best blogs need to carefully weave the information into the fabric of a social conversation. Traditional websites, on the other hand, are the perfect platform for pure information.

And that’s where I’ve been going all wrong!

I’ve been posting waaay too much pure information and not enough conversation on my blogs. Which, by the way, has made blogging a chore!

What I should have been doing all along was treating my blogs and my SBI websites as the completely different entities that they are. (Can you see the light bulb burning brightly over my head?) After all, I have opinions about just about everything on the planet… just ask my husband. It will be fun, I think, to have a forum for all those opinions and thoughts.

Now that I’m employing this new philosophy, meet me here in a couple of months when I re-evaluate the situation again. We’ll see if my blogging insights prove out or not!

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Filed under: Blog Marketing • General Online Business • Online Mistakes • Web 2.0

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