PPC Suggestions: Cost Comparison Versus Blogging for Small Businesses

One of the things that always gets me in online marketing is the number of small businesses that purchase PPC campaigns and get little value from it. I'm not going to go off on PPC, because there is a time and a place for it. Some companies use PPC very effectively to drive millions of dollars of revenue. My view on PPC is that if you're not an expert, follow these simple rules.

1) Have a Product to Sell or an Instant Transaction: Don't use PPC for brand recognition without a larger campaign behind it. If you are selling services that don't require an instant purchase, or if you are trying to drive traffic so you can make money advertising, PPC is probably not for you. This doesn't mean PPC can't work for you, but you have to know how to make it work in a full campaign, and that's more complicated than just buying keywords (or paying someone to buy them for you).

2) MAKE LANDING PAGES: This one baffles me. There is no excuse for having your PPC campaign point to your website or blog. It takes very little time to create a landing page that directs clickers to buy a product. Sending them to your website, where they then have to search for a product is a waste of time.

3) If PPC Works for You, Plan For When It Doesn't: You should hear this. PPC Campaigns are only as successful as your dumbest competitor. If PPC works for you, it can work for your competitors. When they realize this, they enter the PPC space and bid up your keywords. This means that any advantage is short-lived, and the cost of PPC grows over time while the value declines. What are you doing to plan past your PPC success? And worse, what if you're the last one in the pool?

A few words on longevity. I worked with a client last year on a birth announcement service that was strictly online. We stopped blogging in August, but since then over 1700 people** have visited the site from search engine referrals, and even dormant, 10-15 a day come to the site. The cost to keep this blog up is $50/year. Do that math. Having once blogged, and even on a dormant site, the client is getting a PPC value of $.009 per visitor that should last several years. And they do nothing to maintain it.

The value of blogging is long-term returns. The value of PPC is immediacy.

Regular blogging yields even higher returns. StlRecruiting.com brings in 80-90 referrers/week just from the search engines dredging up old content. That's a PPC value of $.001 per visitor for work already completed. When I first started, I targeted people with SEO and PPC budgets for blog campaigns. It was my primary method of measuring metrics. When pitching firms on social media, compare the returns on your traffic and SEO ranking with that of the PPC, SEO, and press mentions (from PR). You'll find your sales pitch more compelling.

**I realize this is a small example. 1700 visitors isn't a lot, but it's relevant to that particular site. Blogging increased traffic to the site 150% when it was active, and drove the rank of the site up in relevant search terms.

Together Everyone Achieves More

If you're a blogger who writes several times a week, you often run into the anxiety of what to do when you have offline business to turn to.

Some people just stop writing, which works, but all to often when you remove blogging from your schedule, it's hard to put back in.

Some people moan about leaving, but can't seem to pull themselves away from the computer. Those people often have exasperated spouses.

And some, those lucky few, have friends that can fill in and write content that actually continues to build the value of your brand. I'm talking, of course, about Rohit Bhargava, who writes the excellent and essential, Influential Interactive Marketing blog.

Rohit had some personal family business to take care of, in the form of a new child, and he prioritized, correctly, putting family in front of the blog. For those of us with business blogs, that's a bigger deal than setting aside your political or personal blog for a few weeks. Rohit brought in some heavy hitters, and in this post, he thanked them for their top-of-the-line writing. The writing is great, but so is Rohit's. What's really great, for him, is that he found backup bloggers who stepped in to keep his site going.

And you can too.

Mark Collier of the Viral Garden explains it, fittingly in a guest post on Rohit's blog.

Recently, there's been some great discussion about measuring the effectiveness of social media. These discussions are important and necessary in order to give companies and organizations valid tools and metrics that they can use to measure their social media efforts.

But in the end, these marketers need to keep in mind that succeeding with social media means connecting with people. I cringe a bit when I hear marketers talk about measurement and statistics, because that's applying a business mentality to an area that's about connecting with and understanding people.

When I talk to businesses and corporations about blogging, I tell them not to think of blogging as a direct tool to grow their business, but as a community-building tool. A tool that allows companies to better understand their customers, and that helps current and potential customers better understand the company. Business growth is a pleasant by-product of connecting with your customers via blogging.

Yes, there are measurable aspects to blogging, but I've found it's the people I meet while writing that sustain me, and ultimately makes blogging worthwhile. If you want to measure the effectivesness of your social networking, take a week off and see which of your blog buddies is willing to write for you. If you are generous with your time, and inject value into your community, you'll find yourself with a surfeit of posters. If blogging is just something you rip off on Sunday nights, and you haven't left a comment in three months, well, you'll get your answer there, too.