Insights from Orbit Media’s 11th Annual Blogger Survey
Having a blog on your website is now considered common practice for brands in all industries. The benefits are widely known: it helps with SEO, provides thought leadership, and is useful information for your audiences.
But anyone who works in marketing knows that change is a constant. If you’re not consistently updating your content strategy – especially the one fueling your blog – you will start to see diminishing returns on your efforts.
This is why Convince & Convert is a huge fan of the annual blogger survey produced by our friends at Orbit Media. Having produced it for over a decade now, it is an authoritative resource to check how your blogging efforts are stacking up, and how you can improve your approach for better ROI.
One of the biggest questions I had this year was “how long does it take to write a blog post?”, especially since there are so many generative AI tools in the market proclaiming to make writing faster and easier. I’ll admit, I was expecting a big shift this year. That was not the case.
Credit: Orbit Media’s 11th Annual Blogger Survey
They found that the average blog post takes three hours and forty eight minutes to write.
This is only three minutes less than what was reported in the prior year! How can this be?
There are a few reasons to consider:
Spending more time (4+ hours), and writing longer articles, yields significantly greater results.
The research found that the bloggers who average 2000+ words per article are far more likely to report “strong results.”
However, this does not mean that higher quality = less frequency.
The data suggests bi-weekly is the minimum posting cadence for strong performance rates.
It’s safe to say that users have high expectations when it comes to content consumption. They won’t settle for subpar content, nor do they want to wait an entire week (or month!) for more of what they like.
Treat your blog feed like a social feed. This takes more strategy and time to produce.
This is one of the biggest takeaways from the research. It makes so much sense, yet many blogs are not yet incorporating it. As Orbit Media points out: “Top performing blogs and social media streams have many elements in common:
Multiple points of view: top blogs have contributor quotes, social streams have comments
Many visuals: both have images at every scroll depth
Videos: both have embedded videos
Timely: top blogs are kept up-to-date, social streams are current posts
Length: top blogs are long, social streams are infinitely long”
Social media platforms invest millions of dollars into user testing and finding out what works for maximum engagement. Use that to your advantage!
Is AI impacting blog creation or performance?
While AI adoption by bloggers is way up (from almost 0% usage in 2022 to 80% in 2024), there is not yet a strong correlation between AI usage and better performance.
Bloggers are utilizing AI tools in a variety of ways – everything from brainstorming ideas to generating first drafts to creating visuals. However, it still takes human resources to provide strategic direction, review for accuracy, and to add a level of creativity that will help content to stand out from other AI-generated content.
Side note: Check out this episode of the Social Pros Podcast to hear more about blending the use of AI with brand storytelling.
What does this research mean for content marketing leaders?
Knowing the data and enacting it in your own blogging plans are two different things. Here are recommendations for putting this data into action for your team:
Make sure you are allotting the appropriate amount of time for your content team to create long-form articles with corresponding visuals. Adopting AI tools doesn’t mean that production time will drop by half. It also doesn’t mean quality will improve automatically. Give your team the right amount of time to create engaging articles that resonate with your audience.
Continue to push for high quality + high quantity. Both are important to stay ahead of the competition. As marketers have started to lean into a monthly cadence, you can stand out with a multiple-times-per-week approach (but only if your content is seen as relevant and important to your audience).
Keep exploring ways to use AI tools for content, but don’t expect it to work miracles. Continue to train your team on the use-cases for AI and empower them to experiment with new tools across all steps of the process. Ensure a human is involved to inspect for quality control throughout each step.
Connect teams across functions to create the most engaging articles. Blogs no longer live with just a writing team. To stay modern, writers need to be working hand-in-hand with designers, video producers, social teams, and IT. This requires planning content out together and working on technical solutions to incorporate multi-media assets across channels. It is only when you start doing this that you can create the beautiful “social feed” approach mentioned above.
Q&A with Andy Crestodina, CMO and Co-Founder of Orbit Media
When I read about new research, I immediately want to know how it is making a difference for organizations in real-life (not just theory). What does it mean to the team behind the research? How are they using these findings on their own channels?
To learn more about that, I spoke with Andy Crestodina for a direct point of view on the report.
Andy is the CMO and Co-Founder at Orbit Media Studios. He has been at the forefront of digital marketing innovation for over two decades. With a deep-seated passion for SEO, analytics, AI and website optimization, Andy is highly regarded as a leading expert in the marketing field.
Q: What research findings were the most surprising to you personally?
A: The data is telling us, year after year, that big efforts drive big outcomes.
This isn’t surprising by itself, but when you see the differences side-by-side, between low-effort and high-effort performance, across virtually every aspect of content marketing, it’s just so stark.
Literally any extra effort can make an impact.
Make your content more visual (images and video)
Make your content more collaborative (influencers and editors)
Make your content more in-depth (spend more time writing longer posts)
Make your content more often (publishing frequency)
Make your content in more places (guest posting)
It’s all right here. You could create a content strategy built around the insights in this one chart.
Maybe this isn’t a surprise. Maybe it’s obvious. Seeing the data all in one place, seeing it year after year, it’s just so clear. So what is surprising is to see so many content programs just sticking with the same low-effort content programs. The same short-form posts on the same monthly cadence.
No research pieces.
No collaboration.
No guest posts.
No video.
What do these marketers expect? They should set expectations low. That’s what the data tells us.
Q: The data suggests that bloggers who produce audio content (podcasters) are the most likely to report strong results. Why do you think this is?
A: That one stands out for me, too. Just look at the chart. Content marketers who produce podcasts are 2x more likely to report strong results.
A closer look at the data puts this in context. Just 88 of the 1,087 respondents said they use audio. And only 35 of them reported “strong results.” This is not a lot of data. A larger study or a survey of podcasters would help confirm this.
Still, the performance of podcasts aligns with other findings in the data. It tracks perfectly.
Going “beyond text” works in content marketing
This is in the data. The more visuals that bloggers use, the most likely they are to report strong results. Also, video correlates with performance. So any blogger that steps up into more engaging formats is likely to see the impact.
Influencer collaboration works in content marketing
This is also in the data. Most podcasts are interview shows, and interviews correlate with performance. And these interviews are usually with influencers, and influencer collaboration correlates with performance.
So really, the podcaster is often doing the other things that work well in content marketing. They aren’t just typing on keyboards and they aren’t going it alone. Hitting the record button and working with others are two things that make a big difference.
Q: In the report, it states: “the most visible marketing metrics are the least important.” How do you think bloggers should be measuring success today?
A: Perfect question. The survey clearly shows a drop in blogging results over the last five years. Fewer content marketers are reporting strong results than ever before. This chart tracks blogging results over the last nine years:
But how are we measuring results?
What metrics are we using?
There are many ways to define “results” in content marketing. But 95% of respondents have access to Analytics. And what’s the most visible metric in Analytics? Traffic. So for a lot of marketers, results mean traffic.
In this context, it’s obvious why performance is down. For many bloggers, search has been a steady source of traffic. But search traffic is down all over the web.
Just look at the responses to what’s gotten harder over the last five years…
But really, there are better ways to measure performance than traffic.
Traffic, like a lot of metrics, is very easy to track but doesn’t necessarily align with results. Ironically, the most visible content marketing metrics are the least important. Just think of these examples:
Followers? Likes? These are everywhere but they don’t correlate with business outcomes.
Key events per traffic source? Harder to see and requires setup but it definitely matters.
Net promoter score? Gross margins? Takes skill and effort to gather, but critical to success.
There’s an inverse relationship between the visibility of a metric and its importance.
So as click through rates from search decline, as more searches are “zero-click” searches, as traffic to blogs declines, content marketers need to redefine success. Look deeper into the data.
Did the content grow your email list? If yes, you’re less beholden to big tech for traffic
Did the content attract links? If yes, it’s helping your service pages rank for high-intent phrases
Did the content drive impressions on LinkedIn? YouTube? If yes, it’s creating brand awareness
Did the content creation process build your network? If yes, keep in touch with those influencers
Is the content useful during the sale process? If yes, it may help you close deals!
The list goes on. Every piece is an opportunity to repurpose. Every article can support others through internal links. Every article may impress the right reader …who could be your next client.
The most important outcomes from marketing are the hardest to measure: word-of-mouth, top-of-mind and bottom-of-funnel.
Now that traffic is harder, it’s time to lean into those powerful, but indirect benefits of content marketing.
Q: You have a very successful blog with Orbit Media that already encompasses a lot of the best practices from this research. What changes do you plan to implement on your own blog based on these findings?
A: Years ago, when click through rates started to fall, I noticed that LinkedIn newsletters were getting some traction. So I broke the old rule, “don’t build on rented land” and launched a LI newsletter.
Today, we have less traffic than we did four years ago. But we have a lot more visibility.
It’s because we decided to give in. We aligned ourselves with big tech’s goal of keeping their visitors. We started publishing directly onto LinkedIn and LinkedIn rewarded us by promoting the newsletter for us and sending us millions of readers.
Launching a LinkedIn newsletter is my #1 tip for B2B brands at the moment. Highly recommended. Here are my top tips for setting one up for yourself.
The low-traffic future of content isn’t necessarily a problem. Publish wherever your audience spends time!
Other plans for our content strategy in 2025?
Launch a bi-weekly LinkedIn live. Probably a “website throwdown” format.
Re-launch our website to further optimize for lead generation
Combine our top posts in various topics into guides.
Pitch to present at industry conferences in a few key verticals.
Produce more video, long and short.
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The post New Strategies for Improving Blog Performance (Plus Q&A with Andy Crestodina) appeared first on Convince & Convert.