Evaluating The Worth of Blog Posts

The number of posts published from blogs on WordPress.com, both on subdomains and own domains

Why are blogs valuable?

Working with bloggers and influencers can be valuable for your brand. Certainly if you know that people watch less and less television and orient themselves more and more in the field of new products by reading blogs and social media.

Marketers themselves also indicate how important blogs are for the marketing mix. According to 53 percent of content marketers, blogging is the most important marketing tactic for them. It is important because blogs are often the first way to get potential customers into the marketing tunnel .

Valuation then and now

In many cases, the big question remains for bloggers and advertisers what this collaboration is worth. Jan Kuper also tried in 2014 to calculate the value of a blog post.

In 2014 bloggers also tried to calculate the value of a blog post. The consensus has since been that a blogger can request a starting rate of fifty euros and ten euros per thousand visitors.

Calculation of content

With the knowledge from back then it was a good start to come to a value. At the time, much less data was available about the performance of blogs, and collaborations between bloggers and brands have expanded enormously over the past few years.

Because people have started to read more blogs and the advertisers want to reach the people there, the call for more transparency and clarity has increased. The problem of advertisers is what does a blog post cost, what is the reach of the websites and how much does it bring me to readers or customers? To provide clarity on this, LinkPizza has been collecting data from more than 15,000+ campaigns since 2016. To properly calculate all metrics, we used the Google Bigquery tool , which allowed us to combine, store and merge the various data sources. In this way we can enrich the data from the LinkPizza system with data from Google Analytics and the advertising data from Google and Facebook.

Based on all available data, we have come up with three different ways to define the value of a blog post: unique reach, impressions and SEO rankings, also known as findability.

The three ways of website valuation below allow advertisers and bloggers to see for themselves which metrics are most relevant to the situation or campaign.

Method 1: based on unique range

With the current fragmentation of the media landscape, effective and unique reach has become a critical goal for advertisers. That is why reach within certain niches is enormously valuable for advertisers. We have made a calculation based on data to quantify this value. Unique reach is measured in LinkPizza and stands for the number of visitors who visit the site within a certain period. Research from Statista.com shows that this is the most important goal for advertisers.  Method 2: based on website impressions

The second way to calculate the value of a blog post is based on website impressions (also called views). The definition of impressions is how many times the website has been viewed in total per month.

Google also works with the term impressions if advertisers want to advertise on the Google display network. So this is already a good indication of what an impression is worth. If you want to purchase impressions via the Google Display network, you pay an average of 2.5 euros per thousand impressions. Of course, website impressions are worth more. We have calculated the real value based on the available data from all sources. The table below shows the results of the calculation.Method 3: findability based on SEO rankings

The third way to calculate the value of a blog post is based on SEO rankings. The SEO rank is especially important for bloggers. Because the higher a blog ranks through Google, the more traffic the blogs get. Google indicates that a high SEO rank is also due to the number of backlinks that refer to a domain. This generally means that the more sites rank to a blog, the more trust the blog gets from Google.

This trust is also important for brands. Because if brands are visible on reliable blogs, then the reputation of those brands will increase again. Up to and including 2007, Google used its own standardization: the Google Pagerank. When Google stopped, three companies jumped into the gap. Below you will find the rankings of the three companies.Ahrefs Domain Rank

Ahrefs has quickly become the number one tool for SEO specialists. Most people praise their technology and the fact that Ahrefs has the largest database of websites. That is why many SEO specialists and bloggers prefer this tool.

Moz Domain Authority

MOZ is used more by marketers than by SEO specialists. This is because MOZ is user-friendly and you can easily explain the metrics.

Majestic Trust Flow

The last SEO tool from the list: Majestic is not yet very well known in the Netherlands, but certainly not a small one. They track fewer sites than Ahrefs, but the Majestic database is larger than the MOZ database. And the mentions tool from Majestic is highly regarded by SEO specialists.

Difference in categories and target group

As mentioned earlier, some blog categories are more valuable than others. Some target groups are harder to reach. To make this clear, we have distilled it from the data. So you can take the table that best fits your situation and add these percentages over it.Extra questions with high engagement

The average engagement rate on blogs and Instagram posts are a hot topic among marketers. Although this is much easier to measure with an Instagram post, you can see that some blogs generate more engagement than others. We think that if your blog may ask a little more if your blog generates many comments. You can include this in the negotiations.

Extra questions with intensive collaboration

Of course every collaboration is different. There will always be a difference in how nice the site is, which influencer (s) are behind it, how the article is written and how long the collaboration lasts. By entering into a permanent collaboration, advertisers and bloggers can create a synergy.

You can use these calculations as a guideline, but the advertising market is ultimately a free market. To provide insight into the market, bloggers have a media kit.