On average 57 million adult Americans read blogs, which is good news for nonprofits trying to generate awareness about the services they offer the local community. If you’re writing blogs to generate additional donations, you’re not alone. Approximately 53% of professional bloggers are interested in attracting new donors from blogging.

About 63% of respondents say that blogging has led them to become more involved with things they’re passionate about. This is great news for nonprofit organizations who can utilize their posts to help volunteers become more passionate about the causes they work with. Hobbyist or persons who are unpaid for the content they generate write about 73% of blogs. Blogs can be a commitment as small as one hour a week to 10 hours a week depending on how often you post.

Technorati has indexed more than 133,000,000 blogs since 2002 and around 77% of Internet users read blogs according to Universal McCann. According to recent data 57% of blog readers are male, 48%, were under 30, and 82% were longtime Internet users or had more than six years’ experience online. Blog writers appear to mirror these trends, as two-thirds are male between the ages of 18 and 44. Over 75% have college degrees and 40% have graduate degrees.

Blogs are decidedly content driven but a growing emphasis is being placed on having more multimedia friendly blogs. Over 82% of respondents say that they post photos to their blog, making images the most popular form of multimedia. Of those who use media other than text, 73% say that that they create the photos, video, or audio they post themselves about half of the time. Only 13% of all respondents say that they never post any images/videos/audio to their blogs, preferring to just use text. With just-text blogs becoming the minority in today’s blogosphere, it’s important to use appropriate multimedia to make your nonprofit blog exciting. Post a picture at a recent fundraising event or a video of a family you just helped. Human-interest stories are really important to make your reader feel empathy in your blog.

Bloggers participate in an average of five activities to drive traffic to their blogs. Which is most successful? Well the jury is still out but Twitter is definitely in the top five. Blogs with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This referral percentage was constant as the audience size of the blog increased. In other words, the faster the growth of a blog the more important Twitter became in promoting it.

It is important to keep up with your blogs statistics to see how people are finding your blog and how often they are reading it. There are many free blog statistic softwares available to blog writers but the five most commonly used are:

1. Google Analytics

2. StatCounter

3. SiteMeter

4. AWStats

5. MyBlogLog

Blogging is not just about numbers, traffic, or hits to your website but can be a wonderful nonprofit marketing tool. Be careful to avoid the trap of writing for search engines rather than human beings. As a nonprofit blog, your key objective needs to be keeping the community informed about recent trends in your overall cause or local events sponsored by your nonprofit. Build your credibility first and traffic later. Traffic is a direct reflection of writing good content and smart cross promoting of your blog. Contact CharityNet USA today about setting up a blog for your website so you can take advantage of these exciting statistics.