How Much Is a Blog Post Worth? A Formula?

Interesting post over at Steve Pavlina’s which takes up the question that I wrote about last week – How Much Is a Blog Post Worth?

In the post Steve decides that posts on his blog are worth $2400 calculated over a 10 year life span.

He calculates this by taking the total earnings of his site and dividing it by the post numbers and then multiplying it by the lifespan of the post.

It’s actually an interesting formula and one that I used on my own blogs for the first year or so.

The only problem is that after 18-24 months of my own blogging the increase in my own earnings began to slow each month and the post numbers continued to rise at a similar rate.

I’m about to run out the door for the morning but I’ll make a few further brief comments on it (note – Steve and I agree on these things and he says them in his post – but I’ve come across people who take this type of formula to heart for every blog and then a year later ask why it doesn’t work):

• Not all posts have the same earning potential – as I look at the posts on my sites that get the most visits and the ones that have the most clicks on ads from them I see that there are some posts in my archives that do considerably better than others.
• Some blogs are more time specific than others – this formula will work better for Steve than others because his topic is more timeless than others. Writing on personal development is a topic that won’t date as fast as writing on a topic like mp3 players (where models become obsolete in 6 months). I find that on many of my more time specific blogs that the traffic drops to very little (if anything) on older posts within 12 months and not 10 years.
• Remember Non Post Pages – one of the reasons I dropped this type of valuation of posts was because I had the realization that on some of my blogs the most valuable pages were the front page and category pages.
• Traffic changes everything – I can just see some people reading Steves post and saying that every blog post is worth $2400 (in fact I’ve seen one blogger write this already). The fact is that on Steve’s blog it might be but it won’t be the case on every blog. There are many factors as to why this is (see below) but one of them is traffic. Steve’s blog is very well trafficked and he’s therefore able to earn quite a bit per post. Other sites will be able to earn even more per post (due in part to higher traffic) but the majority bloggers don’t have his type of stats and will struggle to make $10 per post over their lifetime simply because they can’t attract readers.
• Other Factors to Consider – other reasons why different blogs will earn different amounts will include the topic (some topics are more commercially viable than others), the advertising types used (some blogs convert well with affiliate programs, others with CPC, others with CPM), the type of readers (loyal readers who come back daily tend to be harder to convert in some forms of advertising (CPC especially) than search engine referrals etc.

I think Steve’s formula is one useful way to help determine how much you should pay (or charge for) blog posts but I’d also advise a little caution on applying it quickly across all blogs.

What I do like about Steve’s valuation is that it highlights the long term earning potential of a blog post. What you write today has the potential to bring revenue for the rest of it’s online life. It may diminish to some extent over time but it’s one of the things I am most excited about when it comes to making money via blogs.