17 Charts That Show Where Content Marketing is Heading

I started content marketing in the early days. So early that when I first met the WordPress founder, he had just raised $1.1 million for WordPress.

Fast forward to today and WordPress is worth over a billion dollars.

Similarly, when I first started with content marketing, there were less than 30 million blogs that existed and now there are over a billion.

In other words, things have changed drastically and now it’s what more competitive.

We are at a point where you already know you need to leverage content marketing. But what areas of content marketing should you focus on?

How many blog posts do you need to write? What are the best ways to monetize your traffic?

How can you ensure that what you are doing will work in the future?

To shed some light on where content marketing is headed, I’ve gathered data from 183 companies who are all leveraging content marketing. Each company makes at least 5 million dollars in revenue a year and generates less than $1.9 billion a year.

These companies are in all different sectors, from B2B to B2C, and are part of all the major industries out there. Most importantly, they have been leveraging content marketing for at least 8 years.

Now, I know many of you don’t have a company that generates at least 5 million dollars a year, but the stats and data I will show you are still relevant to your blog.

So, let’s dive into the stats to see where content marketing is headed.

Expect less traffic from social sites

What do you think has happened to social shares over time?

As you probably guessed, social shares have gone down because the algorithms (like on Facebook) really limit organic reach.

In the early days, people saw big lifts in their social share count due to the fact that these social sites were still growing in popularity. But once their growth slowed down, so did the number of times the shares each piece of content generated.

If you are wondering why just think of it this way… when people share content on social sites it drives users off of the platform. By keeping people on Facebook longer (or any other social platform), they make more money as people click on ads.

If you are expecting to grow your blog through the social web, think again. It’s slowly driving less and less traffic each year and you should expect it to get worse.

You need to take an omnichannel approach, but focus on search

Can you guess what’s the most popular traffic channel for a blog?

SEO made up 51% of the blog’s traffic and to no surprise, social media was the 5th most popular channel.

But what was surprising is that referral traffic was in 3rd place at 11% and email was at 9%.

Instead of just focusing on link building to boost your rankings, you should focus on link building to also increase your referral traffic. In essence, you can get more bang for your buck by increasing two different ways to drive traffic with one strategy.

Whether it is guest posting or generating PR, you should try and get as much referral traffic as possible as it creates steady traffic that isn’t too affected by algorithm updates.

As for email, you may think it’s dead, but it’s alive and kicking strong. Remember, everyone who works in the corporate world still uses email.

Don’t be shy about collecting emails. You can use tools like Hello Bar to do this with ease.

Now going back to SEO for a moment… here’s why you have to blog…

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