I used this slide @ Blogworld last month to discuss some ROI measurements for justifying investment in Corporate Blogging. I exploited my daughter Polly because she was the first person I ever gave this assignment to. Mind you, she is now 12, but I was pleased to learn last year that they now teach 6th graders Excel.
The assignment was to take all the keyword traffic generated through a blogging program and assign a cost per click based on dividing the total number of clicks by the total monthly cost of the blogs. Then simply compare that keyword traffic to what it would cost in Pay Per Click and calculate the difference.
In the case above the total monthly blog cost was $2,500 for about 100 Compended blogs. That same traffic through PPC would have cost almost $42,000! This is a great example of the clear&tangible value of widespread corporate blogs. I've never seen this excercise do worse than a 5x blog benefit.
Try it yourself, if Polly can do it, so can you. Meausrment is a blogging best practice
Posted by: Roger on Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Hi I am sorry but I am not following your article 100%. Could you please elaborate? How did writing a blog improve traffic to the website? People always say this but I would like to hear someone once elaborate on their experiences.
Posted by: Chris Baggott on Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Thanks for the note Roger. Basically, Search Engines like things that are focused, titled to match the searchers intent (keyword) and content that is recent and frequently updated. By definition, blogs do this by nature. The real key to a successful blog strategy is specificity. Search engines like pages that are only about one thing. That's why to have a successful corporate blogging strategy focused on an ROI based on search, you need to have blogs that are topical vs. author-centric. Check our our site for some whitepapers that explain this in more detail.
Posted by: Al on Monday, November 10, 2008
That is amazing, Chris. Great stuff.