When it comes to business blogging and content, you simply cannot look for instant gratification – although it is difficult not to in a society ruled by smartphones and social media. Much like with personal goals, it’s easy to get restless and expect swift, tangible results. But it’s important to remember that good things take time and effort.

So read this sentence over and over again until it sticks: you will not see results right away.

You probably won’t see results within the first month.

When they start blogging, most marketers are thinking: “I did my part, I posted the blog – now where’s the site traffic?” And with that logic, I can see why they have doubts about whether or not blogging works in winning new business. Stop obsessing over your site traffic or engagement for each day, week or month – pour that energy into producing really, really great blogs.

And you can take a stab at sales forecasts all you want – they are mere predictions without any regard to how hard your company works along the way.

You probably won’t even see significant results within the first quarter.

Many marketers make the mistake of monitoring their site traffic and sales leads for the first month or two that they are blogging. HubSpot recommends that you don’t even start worrying about your site traffic until the six-month mark. Give yourself the chance to build your blog content so that when readers visit your site, they will see more than just one measly post. And give yourself a chance to reach a lot of people through a wide range of industry-related topics.

Why not?

Joe Bonini, Marketing Director at Impact Branding and Design, explained it best: “As traction from the search engines picks around the six-month mark, you’ll begin noticing that your older posts are contributing significantly to your overall traffic. It’s around this time you’ll start seeing incremental spikes in traffic, blog subscribers, and most importantly, blogging morale.”

It makes sense to allow about six months before your blog starts gaining traction from search engines because a) each new blog post is a new page that Google needs to index, which takes time; b) according to Google, the amount of time it takes to crawl and index site pages can depend on many different factors; c) Google’s algorithm gives priority older domains that have a reputation – and even for them, it takes time. Are you noticing a trend here? It just takes time!

How you can speed up the process:

1. Set your blogging goals

The best way to start working toward your goals is to, you know, set them! How will you know what your blogging results are supposed to look like if you don’t?

To ensure that your blogs will be effective in generating traffic and leads, determine your audience, purpose and strategy for your blogs before you start. How much of an increase do you want to see in your site traffic over the next 6 months? How many sales leads do you want to generate?

2. Be committed and consistent

As mentioned, the secret to speeding up your blogging results timeline is to produce frequent, quality content that has depth and purpose. With that said, here are a few bad blogging habits that will not speed up your results any:

• Posting too seldom or sporadically
• Posting blogs that are too short or lack depth
• Writing about topics that are too technical for your readers to understand

In short, search engines are more likely to find your pages if your content has both depth and volume.

3. Aim to provide value

To provide value to your visitors and customers, write about the challenges they’re facing and the questions they’re asking. I mean, isn’t that what YOU want to see when you visit a blog? If you visited a company’s site and all of their blogs were littered with sales speak, would you find that content useful? Didn’t think so. That kind of content doesn’t do anything for anyone.

Anytime a customer asks a question or voices their frustrations, write it down and turn it into a blog. In fact, in a year, Bonini saw a 583 percent rise in traffic by doing this with his daily blog posts.

Whew! There, that should cover most of our clients’ frustrations. And if not, please let our content team know if you have any other questions or are struggling with anything else!