As a business owner you know that profit is required to operate.
Without profit there is no money to pay the bills, pay the employees and nothing to put in your pocket at the end of the day.
As the owner it’s your job to find ways to acquire new customers so the business not only grows, but simply maintains pace.
There are a variety of ways to acquire new customers. For online businesses the biggest way to acquire new customers for the last 10+ years has been paid advertising with search engines such as Google.
Pay per click or PPC acqusition is pretty straight forward. Google can delivery some expected results with their search advertising. The reason the method has worked is because many people that use Google have intent to purchase or intent to find products. This helps Google because they can show ads to people that are in the right frame of mind for discovering or even purchasing products.
As we’ve discussed in the past, Google seems to be moving even more toward a fully advertised and paid search engine results. Hey, if they feel they can deliver better results with paid ads than organic or free ones then why not?
But this brings us to the discussion of content marketing or in the case of you reading this post – blogging.
Eloqua has one of the best blogs about content on the Web. It’s one you should be subscribed to if you’re interested in great blogging and content insight. Recently they put out a great ebook about The ROI of Content Marketing. In an accompanying post they shared some of the insight from the ebook with a few interesting stats to show here on the GBW blog.
From The Real ROI of Content Marketing:
We suggested a 4% conversion rate for paid search – double that of content marketing – and looked at performance over the same period of time. We found that the cost-per-lead of content marketing was lower by 31% and 41%, respectively.
Content Marketing
Cost Per Lead: $75
Conversion Rate: 2%
Paid Search (PPC)
Cost Per Lead: $109
Conversion Rate: 4%
Blogging Allows You to Own the Content
Eloqua makes this point and it’s a good one. When you’re buying advertising on search or other channels you’re renting space. It’s great for Google and the other sites and it can be pretty good for you. What those channels have done is build their own audience and they sell that attention to you. As long as you need access to their audience you’ll need to pay.
With content marketing or blogging, though, you build your own audience. This can work out much better in the long run for your company. As you build the content on your website you’ll start accumulating assets that will bring in traffic over time from various sources. Right now one of the biggest sources of traffic is Google. We’ve touched on the fact that SEO is likely going to be less of a traffic source in the future, but there are still free channels like social sharing sites.
Something every blog should do also is create an email list. This allows you to own and opt-in list of people that want to receive messages from you.
Blogging Takes About Two Years to Develop
A final point I want to make and one that is highlighted in the Eloqua study is the two year blogging timeline. If you click through to the post above you’ll see a chart that shows the diminishing cost per lead over time with blogging or content marketing. The timeline goes for two years.
I want to add that two years is the timeline we also see at Ghost Blog Writers. You’ll spend money up front and money to keep building content assets, but over time you’ll get more and more leads.
It might take a month to get your first lead. It might take a year to get your first lead. Usually within two years the number of leads will start to increase and depending on the structure of your business this should be more than enough revenue to offset the content marketing and blogging costs.
As Eloqua shows with their research – blogging is cheaper than paid advertising.
What are you plans for the future?
Are you going to focus on PPC or blogging?
Image Credit: borman818