Internet Marketing: Why Your Business Blog Is an Annuity

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Why Your Business Blog Is an Annuity

annuity If you're like most marketing professionals and small business owners considering a blog, you're probably worried about the cost.

The benefits of blogging are soft and fuzzy, typical thinking goes, but the cost is clear: you're committing to posting something a few times a few times a week on an ongoing basis.

That kind of thinking is dead wrong.

The benefit of publishing a blog post is crystal clear and measurable: Each time you publish a blog post, you're purchasing an annuity.

Every time you write a blog article, you get an ongoing cash flow over the lifetime of your blog -- except instead getting cash each month, you get valuable search traffic.

Confused? Let's look at a real-life example from this blog.

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.

Now think about what that means going forward. Assume that page holds similar traffic for the next two years. With an interest rate of 5%, that traffic is currently worth about $10,000 to HubSpot.

Not every article is going to get that kind of traffic, so you should think of your blog as a portfolio of blog posts. Just like a venture capitalist or movie executive, you will have a handful of blockbusters that pay for the rest. If an above-average article is worth $10,000, an average article might be worth $4,000 or $5,000, which is still a lot.

Bottom line? If you're focusing only on the cost of a blog, you're missing its enormous financial value.

What do you think? Do you look at your blog as an annuity? Why or why not?