Spark Growth’s copywriting partner MarketSmiths knows a blog’s no good without pico de gallo. Read what blogger Jackie Potts has to say about what your business blog might have in common with a fish taco stand in the Himalayas…

So you’ve launched your new website. You’re live; you’re public; you’re exhausted. Congratulations! What now? We hear this question often from our clients, along with: I sell virtual whitewater rafting, canine chapeaus, or flying squirrel advertising. Why on earth would I need a blog?

Here are some persuasive stats: Companies that publish 15 or more blog posts per month generate five times more Web traffic than companies that don’t blog at all. Even those who blog 9-15 times per month generate three times more traffic, according to a recent study by the good folks at Hubspot.

A company blog is a misunderstood yet essential tool for driving customers to your site. That’s because search engines like Google and Yahoo! are constantly crawling website copy looking for depth and consistency of content to recommend sites to their human searchers. If you launch a website but never add to it, it’s like opening a fish taco stand in the Himalayas. They may be the tastiest fish tacos this side of Tibet, but if no one knows about them, you’re stuck with rotting Wahoo.

But let’s say your taco chef writes a semiweekly blog about his happy hour specials, the best mountain ponds to fish in, his mouthwatering pico de gallo, and his weekend efforts training the first-ever panda Calypso band. The engines catalog those entries and his site — and star — start to rise.

Our taco chef can’t just start his blog and then abandon it, like so many do. On average, companies generate a 45% lift in traffic when they increase their blog posts from 11-20 to 21-50 articles/month. And B2C companies see a 59% increase in traffic after growing total published blog articles from 100 to 200, Hubspot reports.

The trick is stay the course, nurture your blog, keep it entertaining (consider hiring a blog ghostwriter), and use relevant keywords. And don’t forget the pico de gallo.

Picture courtesy of momontimeout.com.