Should you publish articles on the web? Should you have a blog? Does it make sense to invest the time it takes to crank out new content on a daily or weekly basis?

There are lots of opinions about the value of blogging and different “experts” come down on different sides of the issue.

Here’s one way to put a value on blogging. Calculate the number of visitors you’ll generate each month and determine what it would have cost to generate that traffic via a pay-per-click campaign on Google.

If you generate 1,000 visitors to your blog and the cost of generating traffic in your market is $6.00 per click (which it is in my market), the blogging is worth $6,000 per month. Of course, it’s up to you to take that traffic and convert those visitors in to clients.

Google provides a tool that will help you estimate the volume of traffic on each search term and the cost to have your ad on the first page of the search results returned for those terms. You can get some solid numbers to determine the monthly value of your blogging time.

The reality is that traffic coming to your blog is worth far more than PPC traffic. These visitors are more connected to you and impressed by you than visitors coming from advertising. They’ll know you’re an expert and that you’re experienced and credible because you’ve become their teacher. Blog traffic has a higher conversion rate than PPC traffic.

These numbers might not add up in every market and there are lots of other ways to measure the return on investment for blogging. The value of traffic varies widely and there’s more than one way to put a value on it. Try my approach, do the math and then decide if blogging makes sense for your practice.