In order to succeed online, you need a steady stream of traffic to your website and this is where blogging comes in. Sure, there are other ways to market your business on the Internet. However not all of them are free. The alternative to targeting customers from free organic methods like blogging is to buy traffic through ads, banner marketing or Pay Per Click advertising. Paid methods can be expensive and be a drain on your budget.

Blogging Costs Versus Pay Per Click

Let’s take a simple example. From my experience of working on many blogs, I can confidently say that if you have a blog and post frequently, you can easily expect to receive approximately 15,000 page views or 10,000 visitors per month with basic promotional techniques. To get the same amount of traffic from pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords, you could end up paying anywhere from £5,000 to £15,000 or even more per month depending on how competitive your keywords are.

Of course in reality, things are not as straightforward as this and there are other factors to consider when you compare blog traffic with other forms of paid traffic such as Pay per click e.g. you may also need to account for any differences in conversion rates of blog traffic compared to other paid advertising methods. However in spite of this, the above example will give you some indication of the cost benefits received by using blogs to generate traffic as opposed to other methods including Pay per click. As you can see from the above example, even if you were to pay someone £10 per post to write a new blog post on your blog 5 times a week, your total monthly expense will only be £200. This is still far less than the 10 to 15,000 you would pay on Paid listings on search engines for the same traffic.

In spite of the evident cost benefits of generating traffic through blogging, It is also important to note that it will take a few months before your blog starts to generate traffic. If you write 5 posts per week, then in 2 to 3 months your blog will start to generate traffic, And if you can one post daily, then you can start to receive over 10,000 page views within a few months.

Pay per click has its advantages too. It can be particularly effective in the short term. As discussed above, it will take 2 to 3 months for your blog to start generating a steady stream of traffic if you post regularly. Pay per click advertising can be a great viable option, especially during this initial period.