Marketing giant Hubspot claims that websites with blogs have as much as 88% more leads than sites that don’t. This is for regularly updated B2C blogs. However, blogs in general result in a 55% increase in traffic, and B2B companies with blogs see 67% more leads than those without blogs. The Number of leads increases dramatically with both frequency and number of blog posts.

What kind of return on investment can your blog give you?

First, you need to determine what a higher number of leads and a larger amount of traffic can do for you. If you currently have 100 leads a month and you begin Blogging daily, then by the time you reach 51 blog posts (about 10 weeks), you could expect to see 170 or so leads in a month if your results match those that Hubspot saw on the conservative end. If you have a 10% conversion rate among your leads, that would bring you 17 new customers rather than 10, or 84 more customers a year. If your typical customer brings you $1000 over the course of a year, then your additional revenue will be $84,000.

If you typically have 10 leads a month, convert only 2% of your leads to customers, and expect $300 a year from new customers, your additional revenue will be about $5,000 a year.

Your figures might be larger or smaller, but lets consider these examples of a large result and a smaller result. Now you need to determine the cost of blogging. This also can vary quite a bit. If you have an intern writing your blog, and he spends a couple of hours a day crafting great blog posts, his $10 an hour will set you back $5,200 a year — not a good ROI for the small result but a fantastic ROI for the large result.Your costs increase if your staff blogger is paid more, and decrease if he’s faster, if he blogs less frequently, or if the blogging is done during otherwise wasted time. Your results are likely to decrease if the quality is poor, so the benefits of having your cheapest time-waster write the blog may not be as great as they appear at first glance.

Professional blogging

If you hire a professional blogger or buy blog posts from a service or from your web firm, you can expect to pay somewhere between $10k and $20k a year depending on quality and frequency. Again, this won’t give the desired ROI if your result is small, but is an amazing bargain if you attain the large result.

Haul out your calculator, and you can tell whether it’s worth blogging or not.

Stop, though. This only works, as the saying goes, with a spherical chicken. Here are some other factors you have to consider:

• According to Hubspot’s research, results continue to improve as you have more blog posts on your site. More indexed pages means more points of entry and better search engine rankings. Therefore, the value of your blogging increases as time goes on.
• If the benefits continue over time, the later months of the year would see larger numbers of leads (67-88% of an ever-increasing number of leads). Future years would see even larger improvements.
• Your conversion rate might increase, too, as your blogging leads to increased authority and visibility. This could improve your results significantly.

Just add time

This is what traffic growth from content marketing can look like:

Obviously, the value increases over time. In fact, the ROI of content marketing is among the highest in marketing. Blogging is the best thing you can do for SEO.

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