Do You Make A Living Blogging, Book Conversion Rates, Social Media Stuff

I purposely wrote a bunch of separate posts about ACCM to see what you were most interested in. Here are the top three articles.

• ACCM 2008: Social Media
• ACCM 2008: Lehman's Country Life And Lenser Marketing
  
• ACCM 2008: Encouragement

You consistently enjoy good news and applications of social media to the retail and catalog world, don't you?!


Speaking of metrics, you might be interested in learning what happens when you sell your own books to the public.

• Folks who click on the Amazon links of the Multichannel Forensics and Database Marketing books convert at an approximate rate of 4.5%.

• Folks who click on the Lulu link for Hillstrom's Multichannel Secrets have a 7% conversion rate, to-date.
  

This brings us to the "Do You Really Make A Living With Your Blog?" question I fielded, oh, I don't know, maybe 177 times at ACCM. This social media stuff, coupled with Google, drive an unusual and interesting funnel of activity. Since I started writing the blog in 2006:

• I wrote more than 800 posts, and three books, driving ...
  
• ... nearly 100,000 visits to The MineThatData Blog. Forty percent arrived via natural search (Google), forty percent are from various links on the internet (mostly other bloggers, businesses, and organizations). The visits yielded ...
• ... close to 1,200 subscribers. The average subscriber reads one out of every two posts I write, about 200 per year, 240,000 annual article reads in total. These articles are part of a relationship-building process, ultimately yielding ...
• ... between six and twelve projects a year that are fully or partially attributed to the blog (and books I've written).
• My Total Marketing Cost = $1,100 over two years. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate the ROI, does it?
  

Two things, folks.

• If I can do this, anybody can do this. I'm not doing anything special here.
  

• It is amazing that more businesses, crazed over reducing expenses in a sluggish economy, don't do this ... especially in the B2B world.

The funnel I illustrated in this post will be the primary focus of my talk on Non-Traditional Customer Acquisition at the MeritDirect Business Mailer's Co-Op and Interactive Marketing Conference. My talk is scheduled for 10:00am on Friday morning, July 11.