70 Blogging Statistics for 2022

Published

2 years ago

February 3, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

Are you curious about the state of blogging in 2022? Then look no further.

We’ve curated, vetted, and categorized a list of up-to-date statistics below.

Click to jump to a category, or keep reading for our top blogging statistics:

These are the most interesting blogging statistics we think you should know.

Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles (Backlinko).
60% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads (Content Marketing Institute).
74% of companies indicate that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity (Curata).
There are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world (Hosting Tribunal).
The number of bloggers in the U.S. is estimated at 31.7 million in 2020 (Statista).
77% of internet users read blogs (Social Media Today).
There is a strong positive correlation between word count and backlinks, but only up to 1,000 words. For posts longer than 1,000 words, there is a strong negative correlation between word count and backlinks (Ahrefs).
There is a moderate positive correlation between content length and organic traffic, but only up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic (Ahrefs).
77% of bloggers report that blogging drives results (Orbit Media).
Bloggers who publish more often are more likely to report “strong results” (Orbit Media).
Bloggers who include 10+ images per post are the most likely to report “strong results” (Orbit Media).
65% of B2B buyers cite vendor websites as one of their most highly influential content types. This is followed by third-party websites (48%) and third-party articles by independent publishers (39%) (MarketingCharts).
According to an article by Chicago Tribune, 59% of links shared on social media are shared without ever being read. But Twitter’s new prompt to get users to read before sharing has led people to open articles 40% more often (Vox).
73% of marketers report successfully using content marketing to nurture their leads, while 64% of marketers report successfully using content marketing to generate sales and revenue (Content Marketing Institute).

What’s the state of blogging in 2022? Here are some statistics that may surprise you.

Internet users in the U.S. spend 3X more time on blogs than they do on email (Social Media Today).
Tumblr hosts over 518 million blogs, while WordPress hosts over 60 million blogs (Hosting Tribunal).
WordPress powers over 42.8% of the internet (W3 Tech).
Roughly 70 million new posts are published on WordPress each month (WordPress).
On average, 77 million new comments are added to WordPress posts per month (WordPress).
From 2021 to 2025, the global content marketing industry is expected to grow by $417.85 billion (ReportLinker).
44% of buyers say they typically consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a vendor (Demand Gen Report).
More than half of consumers will stop what they are doing if they encounter issues when viewing content (Adobe).
89% of marketers used blogs in their content strategy in 2020 (Content Marketing Institute).

Do bloggers really earn money? Or is it just a pipe dream? Check out these statistics on blogging revenue.

33% of bloggers don’t earn any money at all (TechJury).
The most popular monetization method for bloggers is Google AdSense, followed by affiliate marketing. However, for high-income bloggers, AdSense ranks third; bloggers are 2.5 times more likely to sell their own product or service than use AdSense (GrowthBadger).
Bloggers make the vast majority of their income from ads, affiliate products, sponsored product reviews, their own products, and online courses (RankIQ).
45% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year sell their own product or service, while only 8% of lower-income bloggers do that (GrowthBadger).
72% of bloggers making $2,000+/month use either Mediavine or Adthrive as their ad management company (RankIQ).
Blogs are responsible for around 40% of all publisher commissions in the U.S. (Awin).
The most profitable niche is the food blog niche. Food bloggers have the highest median monthly income ($9,169) as compared to bloggers from all major niches (RankIQ).
The niches that have the highest percentage of blogs with over 50,000 monthly sessions are food (42.8%), lifestyle (13.3%), and travel (10%) (RankIQ).

Bar chart showing breakdown of different types of content marketing bloggers earning over $50K/year and lower-income bloggers do, respectively

How long should your blog posts be? How often should you publish? When should you publish? These are questions bloggers always want to know.

Engagement starts to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes (Medium).
73% of people admit to skimming blog posts, while 27% consume posts thoroughly (HubSpot).
75% of the public prefers reading articles under 1,000 words (Contently).
The average blog post takes just over four hours to write (Orbit Media).
The average blog post is 1,416 words (Orbit Media).
About 50% of bloggers publish weekly or “several posts per month” (Orbit Media).

Bar chart showing from 2014 to 2021, time taken to write a blog post has increased. In 2021, bloggers reported taking 4 hours to write a post

As competition intensifies, bloggers need to create higher-quality content. Check out these statistics on content formats and quality.

“Quality of content” is rated the #1 most important success factor among all bloggers. However, higher-income bloggers put much more emphasis on promoting their content than lower-income bloggers do (GrowthBadger).
The majority of bloggers add around two to three images per blog post (Orbit Media).
41% of bloggers are conducting and publishing original research (Orbit Media).
Only 26% of bloggers work with editors (Orbit Media).
The most common complaints about content—too wordy, poorly written, or poorly designed (Adobe).

Bar chart showing small minority of bloggers create highly visual content

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” — David Ogilvy

“Very long” headlines (14–17 words) outperform short headlines by 76.7% in terms of social sharing (Backlinko).
Headlines with a question mark get 23.3% more social shares than non-question headlines (Backlinko).
91% of bloggers write only a few headline drafts (around six) before publishing (Orbit Media).

Bar chart showing long headlines correlate with increased social sharing

To get passive, consistent traffic to your blog, you should ensure the content ranks in the search engines.

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (BrightEdge).
90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google (Ahrefs).
Only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication (Ahrefs).
The average page in the top 10 is 2+ years old (Ahrefs).
The average top-ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords (Ahrefs).
Generally speaking, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google (Ahrefs).
There’s no correlation between Flesch Reading Ease scores and ranking positions (Ahrefs).
71% of bloggers say SEO is the most important source of traffic (Orbit Media).
85% of bloggers are doing keyword research (Orbit Media).
Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year tend to put a lot of emphasis on SEO. Their #1 traffic source is typically Google organic search; also, compared to lower-income bloggers, they are 4.3 times as likely to conduct keyword research (GrowthBadger).
71% of bloggers are updating old content (Orbit Media).

Pie chart showing 90.63% of pages get no organic traffic from Google

Your blog can’t go “viral” overnight. It needs to be discovered, promoted, and marketed.

Only one-third of bloggers regularly check their blogs’ traffic analytics (Statista).
Social media is the most popular channel for driving blog traffic (Orbit Media).
70% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they are active or very active promoters of their blogs compared to only 14% of lower-income bloggers (GrowthBadger).
Bloggers who collaborate with influencers get better results (Orbit Media).
Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year from their blogs are over twice as likely to focus on getting email subscribers as compared to lower-income bloggers. They also use 343% as many email-collection methods as lower-income bloggers (GrowthBadger).
97% of bloggers promote their blog posts via social media, and 66% use email marketing to direct people toward their content (Statista).

Bar chart of how bloggers drive traffic to their content where 90% use social media

Social media is apparently the most popular channel for driving blog traffic. How can you optimize for this channel?

1.3% of articles get 75% of the social shares (Backlinko).
The ideal content length for maximizing social shares is 1,000–2,000 words (Backlinko).
There’s no “best day” to publish a new piece of content. Social shares are distributed evenly among posts published on different days of the week (Backlinko).

Bar chart showing ideal content length for maximizing social media shares is 1K-2K words

Guest blogging statistics

Guest blogging is alive and well, and it’s still a great way to acquire links and be exposed to a large audience.

The average cost of publishing a paid guest post is $77.80 (Ahrefs).
50% of bloggers perform outreach for guest posts to 10 or fewer contacts a month, while 7% of them pitch to 100 or more blogs per month (ReferralRock).
60% of bloggers write one to five guest posts per month (ReferralRock).
87% of bloggers come up with guest post ideas themselves, but only 52% of them do the actual writing (ReferralRock).
93% of editors plan to publish the same amount of guest content or more (Influence & Co.).

Bar chart showing what guest posters do. Most come up with ideas, do the outreach and prospecting

Final thoughts

Want to learn more about blogging and content marketing? Get started with these guides:

Do you have other interesting statistics to share? Let me know on Twitter.

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Published

14 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.

So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.

You’ll learn:

Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.

With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.

Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

SEO

How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords

Published

17 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.

Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.

There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.

How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Organic keywords report

The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”

Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:

Filtering out branded keywords in Organic keywords report

If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.

Finding popular, low-difficulty keywords in Organic keywords

How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section

Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.

You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.

How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section

Competitive analysis report with multiple competitors

You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.

Content gap report with multiple competitors

You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:

Selecting all 3 competitors to see keywords all 3 competitors rank for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Paid keywords report

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.

Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.

You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.

1. Create pages to target these keywords

You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.

However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.

Here’s how to do that:

Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab

For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.

Keywords under the cluster of "digital marketing"

2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics

You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.

How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:

Export your competitor’s keywords

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
Look for Parent Topics you already have content about

For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”

Our competitor ranks for seven keywords that fall under the "press release template" cluster

If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.

Site search finds that we already have a blog post on press release templates

If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”

Keywords under the cluster of "press release template"

To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”

3. Target these keywords with Google Ads

Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.

For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”

If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.

If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.

You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.

Learn more

Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:

SEO

Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important

Published

1 day ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Google confirms that links are not that important anymore

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.

Background Of Links For Ranking

Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.

One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.

The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.

Kleinberg wrote:

“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”

This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.

Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.

What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?

At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.

Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:

” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″

Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:

“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”

Why Links Matter Less

The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.

But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.

The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.

Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less

In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.

Google March 2024 Core Update: 4 Changes To Link Signal

The documentation previously said:

“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.

Links are not just listed as just another factor:

“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.

Mueller explained:

“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”

Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.

I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
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Why Google Doesn’t Need Links

The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.

Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.

Read the research papers

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre