How much is a blog post worth to you?

If you’ve decided to commit to a business blog or to revive a stalled blog, one of the first questions you’ll need to answer is “how much is this going to cost?” Right behind that question is “How much should we pay for a blog post?” and “How much is a blog post worth?”

This can cause a problem. Blogs and blog posts are not generally assigned a value. Like so much of content marketing, sometimes it seems impossible to put a value on a blog post.

Except… it’s not.

Blog posts are the best way to increase traffic to your website.

What’s the value of your daily traffic?

If you know

1) what a website visitor is worth to you
2) how many average daily unique visits your site gets

then you can know what a blog post is worth to you.

Let’s get the value of your daily traffic right now. The equation looks like this:

visitor value x average daily visitors = average daily traffic value

Pretty simple, right?

How to value the traffic your business blog will bring

So if your visitor value is $1 and your average daily visits is 500 people, then you have an average daily traffic value of $500.

If you are not sure about what each visitor is worth to you, you can also use whatever your average price per click is if you’re doing paid search. Ie, if your average cost per click is $2, that’s what a visitor is worth to you.

If a well-optimized blog that is updated twice a week can double the organic search traffic to a site in six months that means you’ll need six months worth of posts, done twice a week:

six months X four weeks X 2 posts = 48 posts.

If your average daily traffic value is $500, and it would go up to $1,000. So for one day, you’ve made $500 extra for having your blog.

What gets murky here is that there is a ramp up to getting you to doubled traffic, and there is a tapering off if you stop. Let’s cut it down the middle. Let’s take the 2nd three months of blog posting out to the 3rd month after the blog posting. Ie, we’ll give this six months of doubled traffic.

If you were getting $500 worth of traffic before, then you’d have $1,000 after the posts. $1,000 a day over six months comes to $84,000. That’s six months times (4 weeks x 7 days) = 168 days. Then 168 days X $500 per day = $84,000.

And the blog post is worth…

If you’re going to make $84,000 from those 48 posts, then they’re worth $1,750 each.

Kaboom.

That’s a big number! I don’t think anybody has ever paid $1,750 for a blog post.

Let’s shave off 30% for overhead costs associated with getting and fulfilling those $84,000 in sales. You’re still looking at $1,225 per blog post.

The price can go up again, though: One of the four traffic-doubler blogs was only updated once a week. With just one post per week each post goes up to $2,450 in value.

Looking through a different blogging time frame

With the profits this good, let’s take a second look at that time segment I cut out for measuring the improvement.

It was three months from the start of blogging to three months after the blogging ended.

Let’s shift that to the first month of blogging, through to the end of month 6. I’m going to assume two blog posts a month in this example, and put $300 as the price of each blog post.

The Down Side/s

While this might seem like a no-brainer business move, there are two things to be prepared for:

1) You are going to have to pay for about half of the blog posts before you see any results.

Blogging, like all organic traffic building techniques, requires momentum to see results. You and your business team is going to have to be committed enough to this blog thing to do it and/or pay for it for several months before you’ll see any significant results.

You’re going to have to put up a couple thousand dollars before you see results. If you’re business has enough in the bank for that, great, but some of the smaller, less well funded companies aren’t comfortable with that kind of outlay.

2) It’s going to take 2-3 months to even begin seeing results.

Are you ready for that? Or is the person in charge going to say “its not working” two months in and kill the project?

If you are worried about that happening, there’s a plan B. Basically, it’s writing fewer posts. While blogging really needs bi-weekly posts to get results, you can pare that back. Way back. Like to once a month.

It’s not as good as posting more frequently, but if all you can do is get one post a month or one post every two weeks up, then do that. It will take longer to see results, but you will still get some. And even those infrequent posts will be enough to build enough proof to get your higher up to commit for the long haul. When they say “it’s not working”, you’ll have the traffic stats to refute.

3) You’ve got to have the traffic and the visitor value to make it work.

If your visitor value is 50 cents, and you’re only getting 200 visitors a day, then you’ve only got a daily traffic value of $100. That would work out like so:

What are your numbers?

Play around the with this calculator and see what a blog post is worth to your website. Enter your figures in the cells with red numbers. Be sure to click return after you’ve entered a number or the calculator won’t update. Privacy note: No data is being collected in the form. The calculations are for your use only.

What do you think of this calculator, and what it means for your website, your business and your blogging budget?