Small business marketing expert John Jantsch just released the numbers for a survey he did on blogging, on a sample of 488 small business owners.

Interesting results, which in the end show how important regular posting is to generating tangible business results from blogging activities.
a] Only 37% publish a blog and 57% actually have no plans of implementing one in the near future.
b] Of those that do blog, 27% post less than once per month. At the same time 36% claimed that their blogging produced no marketing results whatsover.
c] Those that said they posted anywhere from 3 times a week to once a day are actually seeing hard results. "39 percent claimed that search engine traffic grew, 18 percent stated that leads were generated and 11 percent could attribute sales activity directly to their blog." These bloggers also claimed that blogging increased their "expert status" in their industry.

A blogging survey was also recently done and the results released yesterday by Debbie Weil, the authority on business blogging, based on a sample of 706 subscribers to her e-zine.
Before we go in to details here we do need to understand that since Debbie's core business is blogging, that also reflects on the knowledge and acceptance levels of her readers and subscribers.

"In response to a WordBiz survey, 65% cite "the time it would take to write" as their most important concern about starting and maintaining a corporate blog. 51% worry what to write about. 27% wonder who in their company should write the blog.
Despite these legitimate concerns, 80% of the over 700 respondents say blogs are NOT just a fad; 55% say blogs will become a "must-have" corporate marketing tool. The survey was conducted in July and August 2005 through my newsletter, WordBiz Report."

Debbie also asked two RSS-related questions.
a] To the question "Have you downloaded an RSS newsreader (or subscribed to a Web-based RSS service)?" 46% respondents replied "yes".
b] Only 34,7% have subscribed to blogs using RSS.

This data is not surprising and only shows that even bloggers still need to deliver their content via e-mail as well, using RSS as a supplement and not as a replacement.






About the author:
Marketers and publishers interested in exploring the marketing opportunities provided by RSS and even advanced RSS tactics can receive the needed education from Hrastnik's book, available at his website: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/bl/