One of the most common arguments put forward every time a company considers a business blog is ROI. When considering strategies like social media, content marketing and business blogging, measuring ROI is difficult as is making your boss see it. Considering the cost of getting a blog up, hosting it and the time and cost that goes into writing articles and blog posts regularly, are the returns worth it? My answer would be yes it is!

The issue with ROI and measuring the returns of a blog is that the returns are not immediate, they come in over some time when the blog content has started reaching critical mass. The other attribute is the ROI is not one time, its recurring. This is why management don’t like you spending time working on developing the company blog but its also why the blog is such a powerful marketing tool. Every post you have published may not bring in a waterfall of visitors and generate a tonne of leads but every post you have published is creating a channel of keywords that will bring in a steady trickle or flow constantly over a longer time. When you build more channels through more posts, you are effectively building another pipeline towards your website and the effect is long term.

Rick Burnes of Hubspot echoes this concept through a great example in his post Why Your Business Blog Is an Annuity . Rick says:

Every time you write a blog article, you get an ongoing cash flow over the lifetime of your blog — except instead getting cash each month, you get valuable search traffic.

Confused? Let’s look at a real-life example from this blog.

For the past three months, a post I wrote back in November about inbound marketing has been getting about 300 visits a month from people searching for the term “inbound marketing.”

HubSpot’s keyword tracking tool estimates that we would have to pay $2.41 to get each of those visits via paid search traffic. That means that each month that post is producing about $730 worth of traffic from search engines.

Now think about what that means going forward. Assuming that page holds similar traffic for the next two years. With an interest rate of 5%, that traffic is currently worth about $10,000 to HubSpot.

As difficult as it maybe to see the value of a business blog which delivers customers towards your business, there is a very very clear value in the long run. It’s almost like those stocks you managed to get several years ago at a bargain price which are now bringing in the dividends and have long repaid their initial investments several times over. Similary with your business blog, you need to give it time and be persistent in making it work because when it will, it will keep working for you.