So you want to start a blog to bring new leads to your website.
Or maybe you already have a blog but it’s struggling, and you want it to get more traffic. Like, a lot more traffic.
Maybe you want to make money running a blog, like many others have done before you.
But what are the secrets to making this happen?
It’s all in the numbers, folks. If you want to earn a spot as a best-performing blog on the World Wide Web, these are the statistics that matter most.
Blogging Statistics That Matter Most If Striving To Be a Best-Performing Blog
We spent time prowling the web to find concrete stats on what makes a blog successful so that you don’t have to.
Here are the top 10 blogging statistics we found.
1. The bloggers that make the most money are in the food niche
Of all the blog niches out there—lifestyle, travel, personal finance, gardening—the food niche takes the top spot. Why buy paper cookbooks when you can find the perfect recipe online, right?
A team of researchers at RankIQ used surveys and income reports to study data from 803 blogs that made more than $2K a month. Of all the blogs, those in the food niche earned a median income of $9,169 a month.
So where does that money come from? Let’s break down the top sources:
- Ads: 44%
- Courses: 25%
- Post sponsors: 11%
- Affiliates: 10%
Additionally, 42.8% of the food blogs studied enjoyed 50,000 monthly sessions or more.
Clearly, there’s a market for food blogs.
If you want to start one, study what the top earners are doing.
Take Pinch of Yum. This popular food blog rakes in millions of viewers per month. But it started out small, with a teacher and foodie publishing cooking tips and recipes on a personal blog. In September of 2011, when the couple behind the blog decided to actively monetize it, the blog made just $21.
Three years later, it was making $30,000 a month. By the end of 2016, that number rose to over $90,000 a month. While Pinch of Yum has stopped publishing monthly reports, the site still gets millions of monthly visits. We can only imagine what type of income this translates into.
The blog’s success took time to create.
Pinch of Yum shared some of its secrets to success in a 2017 blog post. We’ll sum up three of its top tips for you here:
- Blog about what you care about. For Lindsay and Bjork Ostrom of Pinch of Yum, photography, recipe development, and writing are all things the couple cares deeply about. This makes it worthwhile for them to spend time investing their time into a food blog. If you’re not passionate about food, identify what you are passionate about, and write about that.
- Quality content is crucial. And it takes time. If you have 10 hours, writes Bjork Ostrom, spend them writing one really good blog instead of two shorter, less in-depth pieces.
- Success takes time and consistency. There’s a lot of trial and error. A lot of testing and implementing new tools. A lot of frustration. A lot of small but rewarding moments of success. Over time, they’ll add up to bigger successes.
The food blogging industry was popular a decade ago and it’s still going strong now.
If you love creating new recipes, taking pictures of your favorite creations, and connecting with your audience through food, start that food blog. Learn from those that have gone before you. Work on it a little bit every day.
With patience, consistency, and a dash of luck, you can build a successful business.
2. Bloggers who report seeing “strong results” from their blog publish posts daily
How often should you blog?
Every day, if you want to see the best results, according to Orbit Media’s Annual Blogger Survey.
According to the survey, 57% of bloggers who publish content daily report strong results. About 38% get similar results by posting 2-6 times a week.
Only 11% of bloggers say they get strong results with an irregular publishing cadence.
The lesson here is to publish great content as often as you consistently can.
If you publish a post every day for a month and then burn out and post nothing for two months, you risk losing the moment you built that first month.
Get around this obstacle by:
- Figuring out how many high-quality posts you can realistically write per month. Aim for at least two posts per week if you can. But even one steady, weekly post is better than random spurts of activity followed by total silence.
- Picking set days to publish your posts. There’s no single right answer to the question, “How often should I post on my blog?” It all depends on your content and your audience. Start by picking days that work well for you. Post consistently on those days. Over time, your website analytics will tell you which days of the week and times of day are best for your posts.
- Use scheduling tools to write posts in advance. Instead of waiting until the last second to write the blog post your readers expect by Tuesday morning at 8 am, write the posts ahead of time. Use your blogging platform’s scheduling feature to schedule posts ahead of time. This puts less stress on you and helps you nail that crucial consistency.
If you want to take advantage of this blogging statistic and post every day but can’t quite swing it yet, start small. Establish a regular cadence for posting. As your blog grows and you start to make money from it, you can hire contract writers to help you create posts to publish every day.
The more high-quality posts you publish, the better chance you have of standing out among the millions of posts published every month. It will also fast-track growing brand awareness—and your reputation.
3. You’ll be among the blogs generating the most organic traffic when you publish 2250-2500-word posts regularly
Longer blog posts are better for SEO for a reason.
Several, actually.
First, they provide readers with more to sink their teeth into compared with shorter blog posts. When readers click a blog link, they’re committed to gaining new information. Whether it’s a story, recipe, how-to, or interview, a longer blog post offers more of the desired information.
It’s that simple.
Second, longer posts mean more room for supplemental information. Things like images, graphs, and videos help clarify and expand on the written content.
Third, more content means Google’s web crawlers have more information to digest. This means they can gain a deeper understanding of what the content is and who it’s helpful for.
Now for the statistics. According to HubSpot, only a very small percentage of bloggers write 2,000+ word blog posts. The average length for a blog post was just over 1,400 words last year. It takes at least 5-6 hours to write long-form content, and not many bloggers have that much time. Especially if they’re publishing daily.
But regularly publishing 2,200-word posts puts you in a potentially profitable minority.
Of course, you don’t have to publish posts this long all the time. Make sure they’re simply a strong part of your mix of media and content.
If you’re wondering what to write for 2,200 words, here’s a quick list of content that benefits from the long-form medium:
- Case studies
- Reviews
- Comparisons
- Listicles
- Tutorials
- Data studies/original research
- Complete guides
For shorter posts, you can publish:
- Infographics
- Cheat sheets
- Checklists
- Personal/brand news
- Interviews
- Behind-the-scenes posts
- Stories/narratives
- FAQs
Rotating through different types of content keeps things fresh for your audience. Just make sure you consistently publish long-form content. If you publish three blog posts a week, for example, two could be long-form and one could be short-form.
4. High-ranking blog posts have primary and related keywords
The #1 tactic for ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs) is to research and use related keywords and primary keywords in your posts.
Addressing customer questions within your posts comes second.
The third tactic is adding more images and videos to help you rank highly in SERPs.
If you want any chance at getting some traffic from Google or other search engines, every post should have a well-researched primary keyword and a couple of related keywords attached to it.
If you’re wondering why keywords are so important, here it is: a keyword is simply a word people use a lot when they run searches on Google. If a lot of people are searching for a specific word or phrase, it means there’s an audience ready and waiting for content related to that word or phrase.
Doing basic keyword research is easy. Just log onto a keyword research tool like Mangools, Semrush, or Ahrefs.
Enter the topic you want to write about and you’ll get a big list of keywords people are searching that relate to the topic.
Let’s say we wanted to start a food blog. Within the food blogging scene, our niche is quick and easy vegetarian meals. We decide to feature one vegetarian-friendly ingredient per week, starting with tofu.
Our first recipe will be about how to fry tofu.
We run the keyword “tofu” through the tool. We get a nice mix of easy, medium, and hard-to-get high-volume keywords, including:
- How to fry tofu (medium)
- How to make tofu (medium)
- How to cook tofu (hard)
- How long to fry tofu (medium)
- Tofu recipes (hard)
- Air fryer tofu (hard)
- Fried tofu (easy)
- What does tofu taste like (easy)
- Tofu (hard)
We decide to use “how to fry tofu” as our main keyword. We go with the title, “How to Fry Tofu: A Foolproof Guide to Crispy Tofu.”
But after checking it with CoSchedule’s free headline analyzer, we come up with a snazzier and SEO-friendlier alternative: “How to Fry Tofu: A Foolproof Guide to Crispy Bliss.”
We’ll weave those other keywords into our blog post so the right readers find our content.
5. Top blogs create skimmable content because 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts while only 27% say they pay close attention to them
This important stat comes to us from HubSpot. And it doesn’t mean you should make your blog posts as short as possible.
The best bloggers know how to make their posts skimmable by using:
- H2, H3, and H4 headlines
- 200-300 word sections
- Jump links
- Short paragraphs
- Bullet points
- Images
- Infographics
No one wants to read a giant wall of text. Especially not on a mobile device. But really, not ever.
Make skimming easy by using formatting that’s friendly to the eye—and the busy brain. Even better if you give readers a choice. Invite them to skim or jump to sections for quick info, or to grab a cup of coffee and settle in for a deeper read.
6. Businesses that spend $4,000 or more per post are more likely to report their strategy as “very successful” than companies that spend $0-$500
You’ve got to spend money to make money.
At some point, you won’t be able to shoulder all the research, writing, and designing involved with running a successful blog. Thankfully, the money you spend to hire bloggers and pay guest bloggers is a good investment, according to SiegeMedia’s 2024 Content Marketing Trends Report.
The report states that 20% of the companies spending $0-$500 per post report their blog “underperforming slightly.” Businesses spending $4,000+ on posts don’t report this at all.
Bottom line? Carve out a budget to pay great writers for blog posts. You can get started by using freelancers and paying them per post. Then, eventually, build a team of bloggers as your revenue increases.
7. 57% of bloggers who made link-building a high priority reported a “mildly or very successful” content marketing strategy
Link-building is a strategy where you get websites to link back to your blog posts or site.
Only 11% of the bloggers who didn’t prioritize link-building had similar success with their content marketing strategies, according to the SiegeMedia 2024 Content Marketing Trends Report.
Those who reported success relied on organic link-building more than manual outreach strategies.
But organic link-building only works if you have an internal linking strategy, high-quality content to link to, and a content library with a link to it in your main navigation bar.
These things make it easier for people to find and choose you to link to.
Need help getting started? Check out our guide to getting quality backlinks for SEO.
8. If your blog posts get any traffic from Google, they’re some of the best-performing. Only 3.45% of all pages get monthly traffic from Google
This Ahrefs Search Traffic Study found that:
- 96.55% of pages get ZERO traffic from Google
- 1.94% get 1-10 visits
- 1.08% get 11-100 visits
- 0.36% get 101-1000 visits
- 0.07% get over 1000 monthly visits
Yikes, right?
Here’s the takeaway: if you’re getting any consistent traffic from Google, consider your posts to be some of the best ones out there.
Posts that rank on Google have search demand. They have backlinks. And they have content that matches the keywords they used—in other words, the posts match search intent.
9. The best-performing blogs incorporate video, short-form content, and success stories into their strategies
If you’re relying solely on long-form blog posts, you’re targeting the 4th best-performing type of content. You’re leaving the top three best-performing types of content on the table, according to the Semrush State of Content Marketing Global Report. The top three are:
- Videos
- Short-form articles
- Success stories
Incorporate the top three best-performing content types into your long-form blog posts to maximize results.
10. 29% of high-performing blogs use H2s, H3s, and H4s to differentiate their headings and subheadings
Fear not the H4 heading.
It’s typical for most blogs to only use H2s. 28% of the best blogs use just H2s and H3s. But the top of the top use H2, H3, and H4 tags, according to the Semrush State of Content Marketing Global Report.
Using these headings makes posts skimmable and easy to digest. This leads to people reading your posts more, getting value from them, and sharing them—all of which increases your traffic.
