Did you know there are around 600 million blogs online today? According to estimates, about 20 billion blog pages get viewed every month.
Creating and maintaining a blog comes with its sacrifices. The contributor's to this highly tasking and time-consuming activity are continually working on increasing opportunity costs for the blogging brand. Successful businesses assess the impact of blogging meticulously, making it simpler to justify the time and money spent on it. And what better way to do that than by knowing your ROI.
Calculating the Expenses for the Blog
Here's how you can calculate your blogging ROI in 9 steps:
1. Work Hours Per Month Spent Managing the Blog
Check the number of postings each month, how many per week, and how long each post takes on average.
2. Pay the Cost of Those Hours to the Company
Evaluate each employee's monthly hours spent managing the blog while considering their differing wages.
To calculate the average hourly pay costs, divide each income by 2000. In case you're wondering, the '2000' refers to the number of hours worked every year centered on a 40-hour work week and two weeks off. You can then find the monthly salary expense by multiplying the hourly wage by the number of dedicated hours.
3. Costs While Considering Overhead and Benefits for Those Hours
Multiply the monthly salaries and benefits by the typical overhead calculation for your business. This figure covers aspects like bonuses and per-person rent. If you don't know, your accountant or CFO probably will.
More importantly, this provides you with the blog's total monthly labor cost.
4. Design and Technological Costs for the Blog
Use the approach above to compute the labor/benefits cost of creating the blog if you constructed it yourself. Find out how much you paid if a third party developed the blog. To calculate a monthly expense, multiply internal or external costs by 24. This two-year amortization plan is the standard for starting a blog.
5. Cost to Manage, Maintain, and Operate the Blog
Assume you pay $19 per month for blog hosting, $15 for SEO, and $10 for creating and managing landing pages to persuade visitors to download your white paper.
Your monthly hosting, maintenance, and app expenses equal $44. This value becomes a part of the total blogging cost per month. But are all these expenditures worth it in the end? Let's find out.
6. Revenue-Generating Actions Encouraged by the Blog
Unless you're running adverts on your site, the blog's value will exclusively depend on its capacity to influence reader engagement which leads to money. Lead generation is a frequent example, particularly in B2B situations. This step can vary greatly depending on the type of business you have, whether you sell digitally, and so on.
7. Operations Undertaken with a Profit Motive
Set your website data analysis software to only compute individuals who have visited the blog more than three times or spent more than three minutes before clicking "Sign Now" or any other element that signifies the blog was influential. This measure guarantees that the blog didn't just play a minor role in driving fruitful behavioral patterns.
8. Value Associated with Each Behaviour
This element is quantifiable by multiplying the average customer's spending with the period of them being a client. However, the company does not receive all of that as net revenue. Technology, hosting, support, and other expenditures are all part of a blogging business's costs of providing services. After eliminating all these fees, most companies know their actual earnings.
9. Calculating the Blogging ROI
Once you have the monthly revenue, calculating the ROI is no big deal. The formula is roughly the same every time:
(Revenue - Investment) ÷ Investment
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the numbers clearly speak for themselves. So, if you're in the blogging business, ROI is one of the most significant markers of success. Moreover, it removes the element of guesswork from future business decisions.