Business blog — when it pays and when it is a cost with no return

A business blog is sold as something you simply have, like an "About us" page. It is an investment decision: it costs hours you cannot get back, and it delivers in some cases rather than all of them.

This text does not answer the question of how to run a blog. It answers the earlier one: whether it is worth starting in your case, and if you already have one, whether it is worth continuing. Both answers rest on measurement — one external and one of our own.

How many bloggers it actually works for

Start with the figure that puts expectations in order.

In Orbit Media's annual survey of 1,042 content marketers, 13.9% say their blog delivers strong results — the lowest figure in the whole history of that survey. Two more numbers from it that will be useful later: the average post runs to 1,312 words, and the average time to write one is three hours twenty minutes.

We publish the caveat with the number, because without it the figure claims more than it may. This is a self-selected sample: the respondents already blog and have a reason to fill in a survey about blogging. The recruitment method is not disclosed. In other words, 13.9% is the result among practitioners — across businesses in general, including those that abandoned a blog after four posts, the share would be lower, not higher.

We do not conclude from this that blogging has stopped working. We draw a more useful conclusion: this is a channel with a high failure rate, in which most of the effort does not return, because the conditions for success tend to get checked only after a year of work. What those conditions are, we set out further down.

What our own blog produces

Somebody else's data orders expectations; your own settles things. Ours are available in full and are not flattering.

We split the site into three parts and compared how much visibility each contributes and how much of that visibility it converts into visits.

The blog draws the most impressions and the fewest clicks per impression. 45% of all our visibility in search comes from articles, but their click-through rate is 0.06%. The offer pages and the home page have less visibility — 33% — and are clicked more than three times as often.

This has to be read carefully, because a wrong conclusion is easy. It does not follow that search does not work, or that the articles are bad. Something else follows: an article is shown for questions asked far from a buying decision, and an offer page for questions asked close to one. Those are two different roles, and measuring them with one yardstick leads to misunderstandings in both directions — either the blog is written off as ineffective, or it is credited with sales it did not make.

The practical conclusion before we go further: a blog should be judged on whether it leads to a page that sells, not on its own click-through rate. If no such path exists, high impressions are a cost converted into a chart.

One article is half the visibility and no customers

There is one more regularity in this data, more important than the averages.

One of our articles accounts for half the visibility of the entire blog. It sits at an average position of 70 — the seventh page of results — and has not produced a single click.

This is a pattern rather than an accident. Visibility does not distribute evenly across texts: usually one or two collect most of the impressions, because they happened to hit a high-volume query. An impression on the seventh page is a statistical event, not a visit — nobody gets there.

The practical consequence for reading reports: the total impressions of a blog is one of the most misleading figures you can put in a summary. It rises as texts accumulate, regardless of whether any of them is seen by a human. What settles the matter is the distribution — how many texts have any visits at all — not the sum.

Four conditions that must hold at the same time

This is the heart of the decision. There are four conditions and three out of four is not enough — the missing one decides the outcome, not the average of the rest.

1. Demand in search. Your clients have to be typing questions you can answer. Not "ought to be typing" — actually doing it, checked in the Keyword Planner, which is free. This condition fails more often than expected: in many industries clients do not search, they telephone or ask an acquaintance.

2. Hours in a calendar, not budget. The average post takes three hours twenty minutes, and that number does not shrink through outsourcing — only whose hours they are changes. What stays on your side is the brief, the subject-matter material and the review, usually about a third of the total. A company without that third will get texts it cannot publish.

3. Knowledge the internet does not have. Your prices, your cases, your mistakes, photographs of your work. Without them you produce a text built from what is already written — and such a text can now be replaced by two sentences, of which more shortly.

4. A path from the text to an enquiry. A reader must be able to move from the article to the offer and leave contact details, without hunting. This condition is skipped most often, and it is the reason our own click-through rate looks the way it does. Without it you are measuring traffic, not sales — and traffic without conversion is a cost with a chart attached.

Do not leave yourself an escape hatch called "building brand awareness". That is not a goal, it is the absence of one: it cannot be measured, so it cannot be declared unmet. If brand awareness is to be the goal, it needs an indicator — the number of branded queries in Search Console, or the share of direct visits — and a threshold at which you will call it achieved.

How to check each of them in fifteen minutes

All four can be verified before the decision, with no paid tools and no supplier.

The last row is the cheapest to check and the one that most often fails. If an article offers no way through to the offer in one click, fix that before writing the next text — the fix works on every already-published article at once and costs an hour.

When the conditions do not hold

• You sell locally and by referral. Then the faster route is the Google Business Profile and reviews, not articles. The effect arrives in weeks, not quarters.
• Nobody has the hours and the budget is meant to replace them. It will not — see condition two.
• The subject is narrow, technical and closed. Then you need one good document that lasts for years, not a stream of posts.

A blog and "news" are not the same thing

Many company sites have a "News" section, and it is usually the saddest place on the site: three posts, the last of them two years old.

The reason is simple and visible in the data: nobody is searching for your company's news. Phrases about company announcements do not come back from the Keyword Planner in any sensible variant. A "News" section usually exists because the board wanted it to "show the company is alive" — not because of a question anyone asks.

That does not mean company news has no value. It means it belongs elsewhere. A new hire, a completed project, a trade fair you attended — these work where people already follow you: a company social profile, or a mailing to your list. There it reaches an audience looking for it, rather than waiting for a search engine that will not index it because nobody asks. What each channel does we set out under social media and email marketing.

Practically: if you have both sections, merge them into one and judge it on clients' questions, not on frequency. An empty "News" tab tells a visitor precisely what it was meant not to.

What to write about, if the conditions hold

Briefly, because the methodology of choosing topics has its own place and we will not repeat it here. The text on content marketing carries a four-question test worth putting every topic through before commissioning: does anyone type it, who and why, have we already written about it, and what in this text will be ours.

The specifics of a blog add one thing. The best company topics are the ones that make the telephone ring — questions that recur in sales conversations and in support. They have three properties at once: somebody genuinely asks them, you know the answer better than your competitors, and the answer leads to your service without being forced. The third and fourth conditions above are met by them automatically.

The opposite, and the commonest error: topics chosen because they are "important in the industry". Important to you, typed by nobody.

What a blog does outside search

All the arithmetic above concerns one role: attracting people from a search engine. A blog has two more that appear in no report and are sometimes the only reason it pays.

Supporting a sales conversation. An article sent after a meeting does something an offer cannot: it answers a doubt the client did not want to voice. "Here is the thing we discussed" is a better reason to make contact than a reminder about a quotation. Neither position nor impressions matter here — what matters is whether the text exists at the moment it is needed.

Filtering enquiries. A text that says honestly what something costs and who it does not suit reduces the number of conversations that end in nothing. That is a saving on your side, invisible in Search Console and real in the calendar.

Both roles share one property worth noticing before the decision: they work with a handful of texts, not dozens. If a blog is to serve only these two functions, you do not need a publishing rhythm or a content strategy — you need five good documents answering the five commonest doubts, and that is an entirely different and far cheaper decision.

What it really costs — in hours

The price of a blog is usually quoted per post, and that is the least useful form of the information. The useful form is in hours, because hours apply regardless of who writes.

Take the survey average as the starting point: three hours twenty minutes per post. Publishing twice a month, that is around seven hours a month of writing alone. Add research, graphics, publishing and review, and it comes to realistically twice that.

Now the thing worth calculating before the decision rather than after a year: multiply those hours by the rate of the person who will actually spend them. If the subject-matter material has to come from the owner or the best specialist, that is their rate, not a copywriter's — and at that rate a blog is sometimes the most expensive channel in the company, despite looking free.

Outsourcing changes the structure of the cost, not its size. The writing disappears; the brief, the material and the sign-off remain, usually a third of the original time. That third is irreducible, and companies that try to remove it get texts they do not want to publish.

The market offers three levels, and they differ not in writing quality but in how much work stays on your side. The cheapest is a text on a given subject: you get the content, you choose the topics and you check whether anyone asks about them — conditions one and three stay with you. The middle adds phrase research before writing, so the risk of a text written for a zero-demand heading disappears. The dearest adds measurement after publication and a decision about what to do with the text after a quarter — and only at that level does the supplier take responsibility for an outcome rather than for delivering characters.

The difference in price between the first and the third is often severalfold and is usually misread. You are not paying for better sentences, you are paying to move the conditions you will not close yourself onto the supplier. A company with its own phrase research and its own measurement does not need the third level. A company with neither is, at the first level, buying risk and nothing else.

It is worth setting all this against the alternatives at the same budget of hours: tidying the offer page, the Google Business Profile, one proper quotation on the site. All three work faster. A blog wins only over a longer horizon and only with four conditions met at once.

When to stop

This is the section blogging guides do not write, because it contradicts the thesis that persistence is enough. Persistence does not help if one of the conditions was never met — then adding posts deepens the loss.

Set the exit criteria before starting, not along the way, because along the way there is always a reason to allow one more quarter. Three we consider honest:

• After three months: indexing. If most posts have not entered the search index, the problem is not the content but something earlier — and writing more will not fix it. That check takes minutes in Search Console.
• After six months: visits. If posts get impressions but the click-through rate rounds to zero, the text is appearing for questions that are not yours. That is a signal to change topic selection or to stop, not to increase the pace.
• After twelve months: enquiries. If no enquiry has come through an article — neither directly nor as one of the same person's earlier visits — the fourth condition is not met and will not be met by more posts.

Stopping does not mean deleting. A text that already exists costs nothing per month, so let it stay; you stop adding new ones and move the hours where they do something. If one of the posts later starts bringing enquiries, you know where to return — and then it is worth refreshing that one rather than starting ten more.

Where to move those hours if the criteria came out negative, in order of fastest return: the offer page, because that is where already-decided people land and where a change works in weeks; the Google Business Profile with reviews, if you sell locally; and what happens to the traffic you already have, because improving conversion requires no new visits at all. Each of the three has a shorter payback than a blog, and none of them rules out returning to writing later, on different terms.

What this text deliberately leaves out

• What to build a blog on — free blogging platforms, WordPress, plugins and themes: website building tools and CMS without coding.
• How to write an individual text — the title, headings, the description in results, length: SEO copywriting.
• The calendar, the brief, who writes, how to measure — that is content operations in general, not the blog specifically: content marketing.
• Distribution on social media — social media and the company website.