Pay per click or Blogging, where to spend your time an money?

Pay per Click or Blogging, Where do you spend your time and money?

I have to admit that at first I was not a huge fan of Blogging as my initial impression was that

it was little more than a giant black hole, sucking all my time away.

I started with active rain years ago, reluctantly posting here and there,

unfortunately not paying enough attention to searchable rich content.

Just recently however, my opinion has changed. After following

a few posts on the statistics, I have made an effort to quantify our results. We have been working hard to increase our online presence over the years, building new residential real estate websites, CoastalHomeInfo.com and JeffColeGroup.com,

focusing on buying or selling homes in San Diego County, California. We hired website optimization companies in attempts to boost our ranking on Google, Yahoo and the other main search engines, played with pay per click, adwords and guaranteed 1^st page results optimizers. A year ago we committed to pay $700 a month, guaranteeing 1st page results, it boosted our hits on our newest website from 3500 clicks per month on average to roughly 15,000-20,000 a month.

Since Blogging more purposefully in just the last year and discontinuing the pay per clicks 6 months ago, I was expecting to see the numbers drop off dramatically. I was pleasantly surprised to see the hits increase to 25,000-40,000 a month, mostly due to blogging.

The cool thing is that the old blogs continue to grow in hits, silently contributing to our website and I feel less compelled to restart paying someone else to optimize for us.