Recently, I have been thinking about this question—“how might one measure the value of a blog post?”
It’s a salient question for multiple active and prospective projects I’m working on right now, as well as for my work more broadly.
Say I want to charge for researching, writing, editing, and publishing a blog post. Is it worth $100? $500? $10,000?
These are all numbers I’ve quoted at different times for this type of work. Of course, these were for pieces with dramatically different expected scopes and lengths.
I might estimate this price based on the time I expect it would take me, and multiply that by an hourly rate.
I would estimate my hourly rate based on the expected quality of the work. I pride myself on my writing and editing abilities, and have a track record to show for it. I’m not a random copywriter from Fiverr!
Say I charge $100 an hour for my time. A blog post with an estimated creation time of ten hours would be worth $1,000. And a blog post that takes a hundred hours of research, writing, editing would be worth $10,000!
For certain kinds of blog posts, $10k would be overkill. For others, 100 hours and $10,000 might very well be a perfectly reasonable investment of time and money.
On the other hand, a business owner might ask: “What value will this blog post have to me? What are the directly measurable, specific outcomes that will likely happen as a result of this piece of writing existing and being published in the world? Can I provably justify this as a business expense, and a good investment?” From this perspective, a blog post may very well be worth $0, if it isn’t likely to lead directly to measurable improved business outcomes.
That said, the more I think about it, the more I think “what is the value of an individual blog post” is not quite the right question. Let me explain!
Writing a blog post (or creating any content on the internet) is an investment. Visa and others call this “free real estate”: free or cheap to make and publish, but grows in value over time. It has negligible value to start, but if U create abundant content of good quality, each piece of content grows exponentially in value over time, to potentially untold value in the future.
In other words, internet content is an appreciating asset class.
A single blog post may not be worth much, especially immediately. But if U draw it out over time, the value goes up. Moreover, if U make lots of blog posts, if U create a whole interwoven web of content, if U build a corpus—an entire body of work, across multiple platforms, hyperlinked between each other so as to be mutually supportive—the value over time goes way, way, way up.
Here’s a specific example.
I know very little about SEO. I have very little interest in getting good at SEO technically. That said, I have excellent SEO on tasshin.com, despite putting very little effort into doing so. That’s because I’ve consistently been publishing high quality content for six years. All of that content is very densely interlinked, and many, many, many other websites link to my content.
If U search “circling” or “Rob Burbea,” for example, my content about those things is consistently near the top or on the first page. All the more so for terms I’ve coined, like “maximum deep benefit.”
But SEO is just one way of tracking the impact of a blog post or piece of content on the internet. It’s a somewhat discrete and legible impact, but not an especially interesting one.
For me, there have been far more interesting effects of participating online, including: making new friends and allies; inbound messages with new connections and ideas; business opportunities; invitations to events; people to stay with around the world; etc.
And then there are the second order effects of those things—where meeting one person led to a new business opportunity, or going to an event leads to a life-changing book recommendation, or…
So what’s the value of an individual blog post, even a very good and useful one? Not much, to be honest, especially at first.
But what’s the value of ten blog posts? Or a reliable, time-tested pipeline for content creation, that makes it easy and simple and even fun for U or a whole team to create high quality content?
Or what’s the value of a corpus of content? A whole body of work that shows the world how awesome U and your ideas are?
The more content U create, of a higher quality, the more valuable that content will be as the months and years and decades go by. Creating content is the conditions for good consequences, now and in the future.