Banners, PPC, adwords and similar campaigns used to drive customers towards a website or generate inbound leads “are pay per campaign” marketing strategies where as spend on “building blogs” and “building online communities” are more like investing in long term marketing assets. It’s important to understand this when you plan to develop a blog around you’re business website to have reasonable expectations and avoid disappointment in the early stages. Like any investment in building an asset that will deliver long term benefits, blogs and communities have a gestation period before the returns really start to show. In the early stages it needs time and constant effort till content starts to build up and the blog starts to build a reputation. New and early stage blogs rely heavily on generating referral traffic and that needs constant promotion through other sites. Since the better part of the traffic to the blog is from other more popular sites, that traffic may not deliver a lot of sales leads and the frequency of inbound leads may be few and far between. This is the stage at which most marketers and businesses abandon their blog or become frustrated with the fact the output from the blog is not proportionate.

For those who do move on at the same rate with the same enthusiasm as they started with, they will move on to see the percentage of search traffic coming through search engines gradually increases in proportion to the referral traffic and this is a good sign. This happens as a result of a large amount of original content on your blog being indexed in search engines and your keywords starting to work for you. It basically means more traffic on your site arrived there as a result of  finding your site while searching one or more of the keywords in your blog content. This also means the traffic coming to your site is more relevant and the likelihood that they are well qualified leads is significantly higher. The frequency of leads captured through the site and quality traffic will be on the rise. The proportion of search traffic increases in comparison to referral traffic till it reaches a tipping point.

At this stage the vast wealth of search able content on your blog indexed by search engines is the main contributor to traffic on the site. It’s not uncommon to find an post you wrote a year or two ago still bringing a trickle of search traffic. You club hundred or several hundred such posts which bring in a trickle of qualified visitors to your site, it’s a flow of qualified leads or relevant audience and the returns are exponential. At this stage, even if the activity slows down on the blog in terms of adding fresh content for some time, the archives of content which still draw search traffic will sustain and that’s what makes business blogging such a valuable long term social marketing asset.

So if you need quick results and quick leads the pay per lead approach will be the better option but if you are looking to build a long term marketing asset, online communities and blogs can deliver some serious value.