“What return will I see from a business blog?”

This is the most asked question decision makers have when confronted with the idea of starting a business blog. These decision makers are smart.

Where is the return on investment?

Blogging has been around for many years now and businesses have joined in to take advantage of the opportunity to attract visitors through search engines and sharing sites. Other businesses have seen this blog traffic and have wondered if their business can join the growing number of businesses starting a business blog.

Where decision makers often get hung up on the decision is whether a blog is worth the investment – time, money, and resources.

So what is the return on the investment?

Blog Cost

The costs associated with starting a blog typically start with the research phase.

Business leaders are always reading about new ways to attract customers and increase sales to existing customers. Over the past few years businesses have been experiementing with blogging. Other business leaders have seen the increasing trend of business blogs and have researched to see if blogging is a viable form of customer acquisition.

There is time spent on researching blogs, but most leaders won’t count this as a huge cost since they’re always looking for ways to expand and improve. 19 of 20 may work, so they’re used to researching.

Where leaders begin finding issue is when blog costs start appearing.

• Blog Design
• Hosting

These two can be relatively small compared to the biggest investment:

• Human Resources

In order for a business blog to succeed there needs to be a person or persons in charge of managing the blog – updating, planning, researching, experimenting, creating vision and strategy – as well as people writing posts. And the posts can’t simply be written for the sake of being written. The content needs to be targeted, researched, and engaging.

Once business leaders begin to think about this cost in human resources coupled with the fact that it takes time (6 months and/or about 50 posts) to see any kind of traffic, they start to wonder if a blog is worth their time and investment…

Blog Return

I came across a blog post from HubSpot from last year. In the article there was a great point made about the return businesses can see from blogging.

I suggest reading the entire article, but here is a snippet.

From: Why Your Business Blog Is an Annuity

For the past three months, a post I wrote back in November about inbound marketing has been getting about 300 visits a month from people searching for the term “inbound marketing.”

HubSpot’s keyword tracking tool estimates that we would have to pay $2.41 to get each of those visits via paid search traffic. That means that each month that post is producing about $730 worth of traffic from search engines.

Here Rick Burnes makes a great point of the dollar value of blogging.

Blogging is a way to target specific keywords for your business. You can write a blog post targeted at specific keywords your business needs in order to acquire new customers.

The key to maximizing this potential is to create regular blog posts targeted at gaining traffic from search engines. This traffic is sustainable and as you increase the number of blog posts on your site the more search traffic will multiply.

So is blogging worth the investment?

This is one way of saying it can make sense as a way to alternatively target keywords as opposed to paying per click to acquire customers.

Discussion

Has your business considered starting a business blog?

Has the outlook on positive returns turned you away from the possibility of starting a blog?

Share your concerns about blogging in the comments.

Golden Field image courtesy of Shadowgate