I used to have a personal blog years ago.  It was more a diary of what was going on in my life than any particularly interesting Samuel Pepys-like insight into the world at the time. But friends and family read it, and I enjoyed doing it. It acted as a record of my life, and – this being pre-Facebook times – it was also somewhere to store and display my photos.

I’ve been considering adding a blog to my site for some time now, but have been put off by the fact that my site is old and clunky. When I did my personal blog, I had to add posts manually, within the HTML coding, and it took ages to update the code, resize and add photos and then upload the new pages.

So, I decided to create a shiny new website in WordPress, and that means I can blog very easily.

I recognise that I am coming late to this (cobblers’ children and all that!), but better late than never. And I am persuaded by some figures that show why all businesses should be blogging:

• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors; 97% more inbound links; and 434% more indexed pages
• B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not
• Companies with more than 51 blog articles experience a 77% lift in median monthly leads (oh well, only 50 to go!!)
• 57% of companies using blogs reported that they acquired customers from leads generated directly from their blog
• Businesses are now in the minority if they do not blog: from 2009 to 2011 the percentage of businesses with a blog grew from 48% to 65%

Apparently, there are 156 million blogs on the internet.  Well, now there are 156 million and one!

Bulleted figures are from Hubspot
Blog numbers from: “BlogPulse“, The Nielsen Company, 16th February 2011