Paul Rouke - Usability Professional

Ted Dziuba has some strong opinions that I don’t always agree with, but he hits the nail on the head with his latest post about corporate blogging:

Mint is a personal finance web product that competes with desktop apps like Quicken. Mint publishes longer articles about personal finance to their blog, and have several thousand readers. That alone is interesting, but not mind-blowing. The trick is that their content is useful. It’s basically a magazine about personal finance without the advertisements. Social media picks up on Mint’s content, and it gets a lot of inbound links.

Why is this important? It matters because those inbound links create PageRank for the pages being linked to. PageRank is Google’s system of ranking the relevance and importance of content and thus determines which sites appear near the top of search results (other search engines employ very similar algorithms). Basically, each page gets a certain amount of PageRank points for every inbound link (and inbound links from pages which themselves have high PageRank count for more). Popular blog posts get a lot of PageRank and they do so reliably. Pages then ’spend’ their PageRank points in outgoing links. So, if your blog post gets 20 inbound links for a total of, say, 30 ‘points’, those points can be redistributed to other pages simply by linking to them. And this is how PageRank gets distributed from the blog (which is not part of the company’s core business) to their main product information and sales-generating pages, which most definitely are part of the core business. Pages about your products which would never normally get good PageRank can suddenly be boosted up by the links from your blog which does have good PageRank.

The crucial point here is that all the blog needs to do is get inbound links. The content provided doesn’t really have to sell the company’s products, in fact it doesn’t even have to be about the company’s products, although that certainly helps. What matters is that the content should be interesting and attractive to a wide audience who will then link to it and help to promote the company by doing so.

Creating that kind of content isn’t easy though. Many corporate blogs fall down because they’re either:

• Thinly-veiled reproductions of press releases
• Simple company news and announcements
• Badly or indifferently written

Ted’s advice is this:

If you hire a writer to post on your corporate blog, you could be seeing this kind of traffic, too. By “writer”, I don’t mean “Peggy in accounts receivable who majored in English thirty years ago”. No, I mean someone whose words are worth reading. A decent freelancer will run you 50 cents per word. A good length blog post is 1,000 words, and you should publish at least once per week. 5 posts like this per month will cost $2,500.

That’s not cheap. But compared to many marketing budgets, even in crunch times, it’s not hugely expensive either. And it may compare quite well with paying for AdWords:

Now let’s compare that to buying traffic from Google by bidding on these keywords. A really, really conservative estimate of a bid price for keywords like this is 10 cents (but good luck ranking with that bid, cheapskate). To buy 100,000 uniques would therefore cost you $10,000 per month, and you don’t get the PageRank.

The numbers are pretty clear. The $2,500 spent on a blogger in a month could quite realistically bring in 100,000 visitors if the content is good enough and is promoted properly on social network sites (a copywriter who understands SEO can do this for you and it will cost almost nothing). The same $2,500 spent on AdWords, on the cheapest keywords you can find, will bring in only 25,000 visitors.

The killer point, which Ted doesn’t elaborate fully on, is that the blog is a gift that keeps on giving. Here on the PRWD blog, some of our best traffic and even new inbound links come from posts we wrote months ago. With AdWords, once you stop the campaign or cut the budget, the traffic dies off. A good blog is a resource that people will keep visiting and linking to even if you’re no longer updating it as often. It’s a much more flexible resource:

• The posts themselves can help to promote you
• The pages on your business site that are linked to from the blog will gain good PageRank
• None of this disappears if you cut the budget
• Works for all search engines, not just Google

After a few months, the PageRank effect really kicks in, and you start to see your profile in search engines improve. Not only will you get the traffic from people coming to read blog posts, but the rest of your site will get a lift from higher rankings in Google (and other search engine) searches.

So, when you’re considering the most efficient marketing spend for your company, a good professionally-written blog might be a better choice than AdWords.