Today is the last post in my 30-Day Blogger Challenge and it has been a fun and at times tiring experience. I have posted a few blogging lessons learned during the course of the challenge and wanted to write today about this blogging experience in terms of how it impacts marketing.

I started this challenge to get myself in the habit of writing more and maintaining a consistent, albeit for only 30 days, schedule. In several presentations and webcast of Web 2.0 and social media marketing the topic of establishing a blog and maintaining it has been emphasized as one of the key strategies. I could not agree more.

One of main reasons for this strategy is that blogging helps with search engine marketing. Google and other search engines look for fresh content and can give higher result rankings for sites that have blogs posting regularly. I Googled my name and the term marketing today and I was 8 of the top 10 search results!

Blogging is also a great method to get customers to your site. In my own experience I’ve seen my visits increase 573%! To break it down some more, in the last 29 days my blog has had 290 visitors with 188 unique visitors, just under 500 pageviews and my bounce rate dropped by 3%.

If you tell a small or medium size business that they could increase traffic to their site with no advertising by over 500%, do you think you would have their attention? Of course you would, but the real challenge is that it would be up to the customer to keep it going.

The real power of blogging is what social media is all about, being social and communicating. The conversational and informal blog tone reads more like someone telling you a story versus trying to sell you something. As consumers and customers become more savvy of traditional marketing and sales messages, they seek out someone they can relate to and gives them input, direction and comparative experience.

I plan to keep blogging, but not every single day as I have done the past month. I will take the weekend of and try to post at least two times a week.

What’s your 30-day challenge?