Whether you have been blogging for five years or five weeks, if you’re a small business blogger you want to know the answer to this question. How is the blog impacting the bottom line for my business? It is a reasonable question but the answer is not always that simple.
Web Site Analytics are Absolutely Critical
Hopefully you will have some web site analytics setup on your entire site (including your blog). This is absolutely critical for every small business. If you don’t know that you have analytics installed then stop everything right now! Go and register for Google Analytics and install the tracking code on your site. If you are not measuring the visits to your site you will never be able to even guess whether your blog is generating revenue for your business.
Now, assuming you have some kind of analytics installed you can begin to study your online visitors. How many are coming to your blog first, as opposed to your main site. How long do they stay on your site? If you have a shopping cart, how many of them complete a sale? These are kinds of things you can learn by studying your analytics.
I will give you my own experience here as an example. I started blogging for Lightning Labels back in early 2006. Within a year I was getting around $500 in measurable new business a week from the blog. Now, the key word here is measurable. This doesn’t include all the people who came to our site, read the blog, decided they liked us and wanted to do business with us. It doesn’t include those people who found the blog and then called us to place an order. This amount only includes those people who found our company via the blog and then placed an online order. Based on customer conversations the actual dollar return was much higher than that – probably as much as five times higher. Within another year that number had doubled and now, over four years later it has increased further.
Looking Beyond the Hard Numbers
These numbers were satisfying to me but the hard numbers don’t tell the entire story. Because there is your existing customer base who will likely read your blog – what is the impact on them? Most likely regular readers of your blog who are also customers will be particularly loyal. Then there are those people who find your web site and then discover your blog. They might read a couple of articles before deciding to buy something but did your blog help them decide to buy? There is no way of knowing for sure but by looking at the analytics and talking with your customers you can get some idea.
So, as you can see the answer to the title of this post is not that simple. But if you keep your ear out as to how your new customers are finding you and also chat with your existing customers you can get a feel for how your blog is doing beyond just the numbers. And having said all that, if you enjoy writing your blog you should stick with it. There are really no negatives to having a blog and it really is great for your business brand if nothing else. But if you do it well, it is likely your blog is having a positive impact on your bottom line.
Photo courtesy of tobym
