Return On Investment Equation, and Copywriting

Updated 12/06/2006: Visit this link for a more thorough investigation of ROI formulas used in multichannel marketing. Enjoy the comments below regarding measuring the ROI of blogging!

The good folks at Blog Business Summit share an interesting formula for measuring the return on investment of writing activities. Since blogging can be viewed as the art of copywriting applied to the technology of the 21st century, we catalog/online retailers finally have a way to quantify the financial impact of writing great copy.

For instance, assume that somebody Google's the following term: Michael Smith President And CEO. The top result is not the business this individual runs. The number one site, according to Google, is my blog. This fledgling business should have some sort of blog, so that searchers are directed to the appropriate content. Google is driving traffic to my site each week, traffic that should be going elsewhere. There are many examples of terms that drive traffic to my site, traffic that should be going to your business. Here are two additional examples.

• Blogger Nine West Bhavin
• Eddie Bauer Jeans Style # 5318

Of course, blogging costs money. Is it worth doing? An adaptation of an ROI formula is listed below:

Blogging ROI = (ADBT * CR * AOS * PF) / (HSB * S) where:

• ADBT = Average Daily Blog Traffic
• CR = Percentage of Blog Visitors Purchasing Merchandise
• AOS = Average Order Size
• PF = Profit Factor, the Percentage of AOS that is converted to profit.
• HSB = Hours Spent Blogging, Each Day
• S = Average Hourly Salary + Bonus + Benefits

Here is an example.

• Your business blog gets 200 visitors per day.
• Three percent of your blog's visitors decide to purchase merchandise.
• The average order size of a blog visitor's purchase is $150.
• Twenty percent of each purchase is converted to profit. The profit factor = 20%.
• The person you hired to blog spends three hours per day writing content.
• This person earns $80,000 per year including bonus and benefits, or, about $40 per hour.
• Blogging ROI = (200 * 0.03 * $150 * 0.20) / (3 * $40).
• Blogging ROI = ($180) / ($120) = 1.5.

Any time the formula returns a number greater than 1.0, you will be making money with your business blog. In this case, for every $120 spent blogging, $180 of profit are generated, yielding a positive response. In this example, $60 * $365 = $21,900 of annual profit are realized.

Technology finally allows businesses to truly direct traffic to a site via copywriting. It has become important to write content that is search-friendly. The ROI formula, illustrated above, demonstrates that it isn't hard to justify the effort.