The RBI of Blogging

By on June 19, 2006 in Blogging, Conversations, Marketing with 3 Comments

"What’s the ROI of Blogging?"

I get this question a lot. I’ll never grow tired of it. I embrace it as a qualifier of which companies are ready for the responsibility of publishing a blog (they should ALL be reading them).

I’m not the only one getting the ROI question:

  • Charlene Li recently launched a great conversation with Calculating the ROI of blogs – it’s not about the math (don’t miss the great comments).
  • Steve Borsch pins the money quote on the tail of his answer, Return on my blogging investment.
  • Zane Safrit gives a few examples of ROI at DuctTape Marketing’s Business Life.

When I get the ROI question, I try to break it down with a different acronym. Instead of Return On Investment (ROI), I explain that blogging is Relationship Building Intentionally (RBI). There is no "hard ROI" in blogging, but the RBI of blogging can be hard for some companies to grasp.   

I’ve actually had some companies tell me they don’t care about the relationships, only about their bottom line (yes, I’m serious). At that point, I show them how to use feed aggregators to listen to blogs and we’re done (for now).

One company I work with showed me how the traffic on his company’s site doubled since they started blogging. In fact, the blog (inexpensive) has more visitors and views than the corporate website (expensive). Well, there’s some measurable ROI in that case.

If your company isn’t ready to intentionally build solid, long-lasting relationships with your customers and prospects don’t publish a blog (but you should still be reading them).

technorati tags: Blogging ROI

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  • http://www.ggci.com/blog/ Barry Zweibel

    Hi Mike ~ My experience is that not only are blogs great for establishing customer/client relationships, they’re fabulous vehicles for SUSTAINING client/customer relatinships, as well.
    What’s the cost of a few good blog posts, by the way? A few dollars, tops, right? With that small a denominator, you don’t need all that much additional on the top-line to see how the ROI math is gonna work almost every single time.

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    Great point, Barry. Big bucks are laid out for customer retention studies, software and marketing. Yet a blog is a way to establish and sustain current relationships. It’s also a great way for prospective clients to see how you work.

  • James

    I’ve thought about setting up a blog, but I have a question first. Main question. The blogs I’ve seen do not allow user to upload files (excel, pdf, word, jpg). I think that this tool would be much more powerful if I could link documents to my comments. So, why use a “Blog” instead of a “Group”?