Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, October 3, 2006:
ROI of Blogging
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Charlene Li of Forrester is working on Calculating the ROI of blogging. He’s focused on medium to large companies, but I thought I’d put my 2 cents in anyway with some hard numbers. I’m just going to show direct sales of a few popular posts, I’m not digging into the long tail (yack) of all my posts.
One example of a great ROI post is the one I did about the designing of the UserScape and HelpSpot logo’s. This post created lot of beta testers for HelpSpot, who eventually turned into customers. More to the point though, this post created lots of business for Mike, the fellow who designed them. Conservatively I’d guess he made sales of $10,000 - $15,000 directly attributable to that post.
As for my own sales, the top 5 sale creating blog posts on this blog generated the following revenue numbers:
1. $13,334
2. $3,199
3. $1,699
4. $1,140
5. $1,074
That’s $20,446 in sales directly attributable to just those 5 posts. I’d also mention that none of the posts are articles, just average posts. So a moderately successful blog can create lots of value for a business just in direct sales. Of course beyond the money you have the general good will blogging creates, new contacts, and word of mouth all of which are much harder to calculate.
Discussion
Would you share what were the other 4 posts that brought the top 5 revenue?
Created by Boris Yankov on 10.03.2006 10:35 pm
Hmm, I might be willing to share a few. Let me look them over. There's nothing in them you can't get from this post though:
http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/search_engine_optimization
Created by Ian on 10.03.2006 10:56 pm
I also want to see which posts were those. Just to get some ideas about what sort of things potential customers notice..
Created by Ali on 10.04.2006 4:20 am
I'm not going to give out all the posts (secret sauce), but here's one that's representative. The link below is #2 from the post.
http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/help_desk_ticket_system/
Created by Ian on 10.04.2006 7:26 am
I wonder how well blogging works if your customers are in a non-technical industry. I expect every industry has its early adopters who are Internet-savvy, and those early adopters are the first market you want to focus on, so perhaps a blog can always be helpful. It'd be interesting to know about the ROI on blogging for someone selling, say, dental office management software. My gut feeling right now is that for that small segment of those customers who are hooked into the web, a blog can help build trust via transparency, but maybe won't help with "crossing the chasm" to the more traditional customers.
Created by Jesse on 10.04.2006 8:15 am
Well most of those sales were not from people actually following the blog, just people who found it via the search engine. So in that case I think blogging helps a lot simply because they index well.
Since it's really the search engines generating the sales it should work OK for non-techs as well.
Created by Ian on 10.04.2006 8:22 am
Ian,
Would you mind revealing how you tracked the link between blog entries and sales? Is this an estimate or did you use some web server log analyzer? Or are you tracking sessions via your website php code behind the scenes?
I've recently been struggling with the best approach to track effectiveness of my blog entries and search engine traffice, etc. and whether to custom code something or use an existing product/package.
Created by Jon Trainer on 10.04.2006 9:47 am
Sure. I just set a cookie when a visitor comes on the site which holds the referrer they came in on. The cookie has a long life since I only want to know how they first found me, not subsequent visits. The only time I access that cookie is during a trial sign up. When the customer signs up for a trial the referrer is logged.
Since 99% of my customers trial before they buy this has worked out great.
It's not anywhere close to 100% accurate, but at least it gives me an idea. Problems include, people who clean their cookies, use different browsers, use different computers (work/home), etc.
I would guess all 5 of the numbers above are low to be honest, but that's all the hard data I have.
Created by Ian on 10.04.2006 9:54 am
Nice and simple - I like it. I guess I was thinking too hard about the problem.
It would be interesting to see the average time difference between the first visit and the time of sale. Or how long did it take you to realize the ROI on that blog entry. Obviously, this is a moving number but it would still be interesting to track this.
Created by Jon Trainer on 10.04.2006 10:01 am
That would be interesting, unfortunately I don't have that number. I don't track the date the cookie was set. I probably should though, maybe I'll add that when I have some time.
Created by Ian on 10.04.2006 10:06 am
I've seen the same kind of bounces in sales for my Rails e-commerce book when I've blogged about it. So, even (and maybe especially) for small outfits like me, assuming you have some kind of audience (getting hooked into an aggregator on the topic is a good start), blogging is an excellent way to generate sales.
Created by Benjamin Curtis on 10.05.2006 7:38 am
Ian,
I ended up using Mike as a result of your and Nola Stowe's recommendation. I even met up with him back in June for dinner. 
Created by Keith Casey on 10.11.2006 3:50 pm