Ever wondered if your blogging efforts are worth it? Well, you can do like Groove did and calculate it yourself.
Blogging may be more expensive than you think. Here’s their setup:
Aside from my own time spent on the blog each week, here’s what it costs us:
- $500 per month: Engine Yard hosting for groovehq.com
- $129 per month: Campaign Monitor, which we use to send emails to our subscriber list
- $1,500 per post: Team hours spent on writing, editing, research, design and coding
Now, there are certainly other costs we sometimes incur related to the blog: KISSmetrics, Optimizely, Crazy Egg and some other apps and tools. But we’d be paying for these anyway, as we use them heavily for our marketing site; the blog traffic doesn’t push us into the next pricing tier for any of them.
That brings us to a grand total — divided by four posts per month — of $1,657.25 per post.
You may also consider my breakdown of website costs, for everything but the $1500 of team hours that they note here. But they get a lot from their investment too.
Blogging can be hugely valuable to your business.
It can bring you more authority, more validation, more customers and more revenue.
…
Doing it right means doing your best to publish valuable, interesting and useful content, and then doing everything you can to make sure that your potential customers see it.
For what it’s worth, I find Groove’s blog to be a fantastic product blog, and if you’re in a similar space, you should definitely check it out to see just how transparent they and engaging they are with their audience.
