Measuring Investment in Blogging

At the New Communications Forum a couple of weeks ago, we started a discussion about the ROI of blogging.  My point was that we cannot begin to measure "return" on investment until we know what the "investment" is.

As business leaders who blog, the members of this club have invaluable information on this topic.  Therefore, I was hoping to start a discussion here that may turn into a formal research study down the road.

When I talk about "investment" I don't mean just the technology costs (which are, honestly, pretty negligible, and easy to discover).  Rather, I want to understand what the elements of the real cost of blogging are:

• Time spent
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • How do you know?  Do you set aside an hour a day?  Do you blog in 5 min. increments throughout the day?  Are you substituting blogging for another activity or is purely an addition to your tasks?
  • How do you measure the cost of this time?  Billable hours?  Percentage of salary?
• Individual vs. group blogs
  • Are you the only one blogging?  Are there other authors on your blog?  Or do you have multiple blogs?
• Employee blogs
  • Do your employees blog on their own time?  Company time? 
  • Do you cover the cost of their blogs? 
  • How do you measure the cost?

Are you actually measuring the investment in your blogs in any kind of systematic way?  Have you been thinking about ROI at all?

I know there are a lot of questions here, but I would appreciate it if you could begin to share your thoughts below, as I think we can all benefit from this discussion.  If you would prefer a private conversation, please contact me at ealbrycht at gmail dot com.  Thanks!

Comments

[paul]

Blogging is about sharing, I am fortunate to be in a community of exceptionally brilliant people, so by sharing I am learning so much more.

[Yvonne DiVita]

So far, blogging has increased my 'reach' by putting my message in front of people all over the world...who write to me weekly and compliment me on my blog. It has also...brought me business. Business that may easily soar into the thousands of dollars...no, into the tens of thousands of dollars. With more to come. ROI for me isn't necessarily about the money, or even the business, as it is about the connection. With the connections I'm making, I can now move my business to the next level...knowing I have a support system... a three-tiered level of support from professionals willing to help me succeed, to individuals who are eager to buy my wares, and other bloggers who are interested in partnering on projects. That could not happen as quickly and effectively as it has happened, were it not for my blog.

[Paul Woodhouse]

I'm constantly plugged into my blog. I started it as an additional element to my web presence - nothing amazing in that at all you might cry. However, if I look at it in terms of webmaster hours and seo terms, then it starts to make sense.

Let's look at the idea of a reciprocal linking campaign for a main site in order to increase pagerank and hopefully your keyword ranking and finally your hits. It's impossible to do this quickly without buying a link. It's also as dull as dishwater and doesn't half take up a bit of time.

With a blog you're being linked to as you waddle around the blogosphere at your own pace finding your niche. You're killing a few birds with one stone when you start talking about the network you're involving yourself with at the same time. I'll accept these links may not be perfectly reciprocal, but that's maybe a moot point.

If I have a bit of time on my hands I may concoct a lenghty post and if I haven't I can rustle something up in five minutes.

I really do feel that even though I'm more absorbed within the blog, it actually saves me a great deal of time, effort and boredom.

Essentially I now look after the blog and the websites look after themselves. Hits went up by 500% immediately and so did enquiries as indeed did bookmarks. And, since it received some pagerank we're maybe talking 1000%-1500%.

It's maybe quite a difficult thing to unravel like some people wish because it's not about point A, to B to C, but if I were to really have a look at it all I could. It's also quite tricky to equate existing marketing ideas to their blogging counterparts. However, the only thing I'm particularly bothered about is whether it brings in more leads. And it most certainly does.

I probably spend the same amount of time as I did before regarding the web presence, but the results are a touch more impressive. If I was being paid a basic salary plus a commission, I'd be infinitely happier now. As indeed would my employer.

The ROI question is crucial to the success of business blogging. I understand the conversation part and in the business I'm in you can bankrupt somebody, and yourself, without proper communication. Blogs make you believable and trustworthy, everything else is just bullshit. But, if you don't bring in the dollars you don't get to blog.

I think it's more of a case of which is the best way to make most money that alot of folk like Bob Bly are whining about. And I'll gladly leave them to it. Blogging doesn't even need to enter into the conversation. A blog can make you money and keep the blood pressure down.

Have I laboured the point enough yet?

If you want to get in touch and try and get more specific details, I'd be more than happy to oblige, Elizabeth.

[Gary Goldhammer]

Before you can measure ROI, you have to have something to say – and that can be the more challenging task. I have a few questions to add to Elizabeth’s excellent list:

Do you fall into the “trackback trap,” that insatiable desire to write about what other bloggers are writing about?

Do you find yourself writing shorter posts with lots of links, or longer posts with fewer links but more original content?

And finally, do you ever get “Blogger’s Block?”

Since I’m posing the questions, I’ll answer first. Yes, not only did I fall into the “trackback trap,” I was in so deep it took a Marine Expeditionary Unit and two St. Bernards to find me and dig me out. I hadn’t had an original thought in so long I was mistaken for an American television executive.

My posts vary – this comment is pretty short but link-free, while most of my blog entries are long with only a few links. I almost never write brief, “news” oriented posts that link to other articles, though I will link to resources and references at the end of a post.

And finally, about whether I get Blogger’s Block….

[Anne Stanton]

It is true that blogging takes time. I invest time in updating my blog daily and in reading the other 70 or so blogs I keep track of... however here are some time shifts.
1) I no longer read eNewsletters, I read blogs.
2) When I compile this companies newsletter, I can quickly and easily pull from the 30 or so monthly blog posts. I don't have to think about what to write.
3) I often refer clients/prospects etc. to specific posts depending on what their needs are.
4) The blog becomes a constant knowledge base for me to tap into and so feeding it is a no brainer.
5) I write in the blog when I feel like it. It is a release to a certain extent. Sort of like updating a library.
6) The blog has also helped me to expand my contact sphere. In fact running a National business requires the virtual connects..
7) I could do what I do without the virtual communities and the blog.
etc.

[anu gupta]

Hi Elizabeth,

Yup, lots of people are spending lots of time thinking about ROI in this field, and I don't think it's going to be resolved any time soon - weblogging, like many other "soft" tasks, seems quite resistant to meaningful quantitative analysis [beyond the most simplistic, and thus most easily discredited].

Here are some links to stuff on my blog
Rethinking ROI in KM initiatives
Information Diffusion Through Blogs
and [one of my favourites !]: A Scotsman's tip on ROI

I think this is an important topic, the more data the better !!

cheers

anu

[Paul Shrater]

This is an interesting site that I think has the potential to help newbie corporate bloggers -- like me. Having recently launched our company's blog at www.minimus.biz/blog.html as a way to have a more informal interaction with our customers (and it has secondary benefits as great source material for the press), I am scouring the web soaking up knowledge about the blogosphere and our company's place in it.

[john]

I think blogging has a huge return on investment if the blogger is a natural at wriing and offers content of high quality. For businesspeople and technologists, I think, first of all, the content has to be strong. I have been surprised and dissapointed about the poor level of so much corporate blogging. I would be much less likely to do business with these individuals based on the incoherence or banality of their blogs. So, I would start by emphasizing ROI of blogging is related to quality of content and that many business/tech blogs offer poor quality. An other major parameter in the ROI of blogs is if the person is a natural writer. Quality blogs take effort and if you are not naturally inclined to write it will take a significant amount of time and focus away from what you might otherwise do best.

As for the benefits, I concur with many of the comments made herein. May I emphasize that I have the blog to be of importance to internal communication, sharing information and insights within our company. Additionally, the blog is very helpful as a recruiting tool because it provides candidates with great insights into the culture, sentiments, thoughts and intellect of our company. Finally, I find writing the blog to be very helpful as it clarifies and memorializes my thoughts so I can better track and think out our company's strategy.

Thanks,

John

[monty loree]

Traditionally I have spent hours SEOing my web pages of static text. For the most part I rank pretty highly for my keywords, but have noticed that others are scraping my content, thus devaluing what I've written. I was shocked to learn about how content is devalued by scrapers at New Orleans Webmasterworld conference in June. I checked copyscape.com with most of my main pages and sure enough several people had helped themselves to my content.

The other thing I learned is that quantity and quality of pages will help your pagerank and traffic with Google. The fresher your material, the more frequently the search engines will come by to see what you've got.

The search engines demonstrated how they're detecting scraped material on pages. This is the end of the scraper site. This just told me that writing high quality, credible, and fresh content in volume was the only thing to do.

We are trying blog style pages on some of our sites web sites. I'm also furiously writing a blog as a trial to see how it works.

When writing static pages, I would make sure that I've got 15-22% keyword to text ratio, while at the same trying to make the page meaningful and valuable to the reader. This is painful and time consuming. An we have seen good results from it.

The thing I like about blog style writing for web site pages is that it allows me to be able to write several Q&A type pages per day, giving fresh content for my readers and hopefully keyword pages for the search engines.

I was having a writing block with trying to just write technical pages for my sites. When I thought about pages as conversations, it opened up a whole bunch of new ideas for content and keywords development.

I'm still wondering about the ROI question. I've written about 200 blog post style pages in the last few weeks. The pages I've written haven't gotten a pagerank on google yet and aren't visible.

I'm going to R&D what works, until I find what works!

Interesting post.

Financial Maturity Blog

[Alexander Kolt]

Cool stuff. Keep up the good work. Revelations of John: http://anthony.ianniciello.net/blog/archives/000079.html , Naked truth

[John Reed]

You have some really cool stuff at your site. I'm sure gonna come back here. Revelations of John: http://anthony.ianniciello.net/blog/archives/000079.html , Naked truth

[Sanjay Patel]

I can really relate to "Blogger's Block" and "Trackback Trap" mentioned above. It's just too easy to read all of these blogs and make these ideas your own. I've learned that to be innovative sometimes it helps to NOT read other blogs. Exposing yourself to other ideas can narrow your ability to crank out creative ideas.

As the owner of my company, we're starting a blog on young entrepreneurship. I'm not really going to worry about SEO or keyword rich content and instead focus on content. That's the beatuy of blogs, people actually come to read the blog -- visitors to your corporate site hardly read content, they just want to know how you can help them.

[John Smith]

Mission

VMT Scientific specializes in the design, development, testing and patenting of sophisticated medical technologies for proprietary use in tissue histogenesis.

This globally patented technology is being developed for use in neurological and vascular medicines, especially in the area of Diabetic Neuropathy and other Diabetic Circulatory Disorders.

WWW.VMTF.COM

[Jason Stamper]

Elizabeth, you make some important points. I've come up with an index to try and measure the ROI of blogging. It's fairly rudimentary at this stage and I plan on improving it, but as a quick calculation of the ROI of a blog it's not a bad start. You can find it here: http://www.businessreviewonline.com/blog/archives/2006/04/the_roi_of_blog.html