roi of blogging
Charlene Li of Forrester is working on Calculating the ROI of blogging. He's focused on medium to large companies, but I thought I'd put my 2 cents in anyway with some hard numbers. I'm just going to show direct sales of a few popular posts, I'm not digging into the long tail (yack) of all my posts.
One example of a great ROI post is the one I did about the designing of the UserScape and HelpSpot logo's. This post created lot of beta testers for HelpSpot, who eventually turned into customers. More to the point though, this post created lots of business for Mike, the fellow who designed them. Conservatively I'd guess he made sales of $10,000 - $15,000 directly attributable to that post.
As for my own sales, the top 5 sale creating blog posts on this blog generated the following revenue numbers:
- $13,334
- $3,199
- $1,699
- $1,140
- $1,074
That's $20,446 in sales directly attributable to just those 5 posts. I'd also mention that none of the posts are articles, just average posts. So a moderately successful blog can create lots of value for a business just in direct sales. Of course beyond the money you have the general good will blogging creates, new contacts, and word of mouth all of which are much harder to calculate.