Most people dream of becoming an overnight success. There is the illusion that if the right person will stumble across them, everything will fall into place. But in truth, most overnight successes were built on years of hard work and planning.

When it comes to establishing organic traffic for your website through blogging and appropriate keyword usage, a few months just isn’t long enough to see results. However, if you hang in there with consistent effort, there is a payoff.   Unfortunately, many small business owners don’t seem to have the patience it takes for true success. They try something for a few months and just as it begins to get a little traction, they stop and move on to something else.

I found this terrific graphic on the Fearless Competitor Blog   from a study by  Kapost/Eloqua ebook on the ROI of Content Marketing. Essentially, it takes about 18 months of consistent content generation before organic activities outperformed paid search.

While the numbers will vary by industry, the curve is fairly representative across the board. If you are looking for a quick spike in traffic, paid search is going to deliver more results in the short term. But as soon as you stop paying, the traffic will dry up. There is no residual effect.

A Small Business Blog Breeds Success

In contrast, it will take longer to build an audience by blogging, but once the content is created, each page and each blog post continue to contribute to your overall page rank indefinitely.  Once the scales tip, the organic results continue to grow while PPC remains flat.

At Roundpeg, we ran an experiment.  We picked a few key terms which were important to our business.  We began to use them consistently in blog posts.  It took almost 9 months to move from the back of the back of the pack in a competitive category to page one or two in most Google searches for those terms.   And the phones have begun to ring.  We routinely generate 1 – 2 leads a week from our website.   We have seen similar results for some of our clients sites as well.

If you need rapid results then PPC may be the way to go in the short term. But because of the long term residual benefits, even if you are investing in PPC now, an investment in blogging and organic search activities will allow you to reduce your dependency over time. With concerted effort, you too can become an overnight success.