I can’t begin to guess how many times I’ve complained when someone with my e-mail address would forward something silly to me and a few hundred friends – with all of our names exposed in the CC – only to have half a dozen people hit “reply-all” instead of responding directly to her. (Admittedly, occasionally a person on the list might find that the forward was a scam and link everyone to snopes before it spread any further.)

However, my latest experience sheds a new perspective on this accidental virtual community phenomenon.

I think it was the Christmas before last, my girlfriend bought me a certificate for a massage. While chatting with the masseuse, it turned out we had a couple of common interests that might lead to a possible business relationship in the future. That, and she was just a really wonderful person. Before I left, we exchange e-mail addresses and later made a connection on MySpace. From there, we rarely communicated.

I’ve been offline a lot lately due to moving. I still don’t have Internet access at home. Last night, I took my laptop down to the pool area where the complex provides free wireless access. I checked the one e-mail account that I never access from work and found a huge thread burning.

I’d gotten one of the previously-mentioned e-mails (band promotion) from my one time masseuse some time in the past. One of the other recipients on the e-mail replied to all to inform us that our friend and masseuse was in an accident. She was the victim of a hit and run while riding her bike. She went into surgery with lots of cuts and bruises and a fractured skull. Consult a severe accidents – auto wreck lawyer what you need to do to protect your rights after an accident.

How else could any one of us know how to contact so many people that knew and cared about this person? One by one, these people who knew her would respond to the list either with updates on her condition or with stories about how they know her and why they care about her. Slowly, this group of disconnected people became a community with something in common.

She’s out of the hospital now and is slowly healing up at home. I don’t think she knows about the outpouring of love and concern attached to an e-mail promoting one of her favorite bands. When she gets on her feet again – and in front of a monitor – it will all be waiting there in her inbox.

Disclaimer

I’m using the term ‘blog’ as it’s accurate to the subject; however, any source of original syndicated content would apply. To assume that what I present here is limited to the scope of blogging is rather close minded.

The Setup

As folks who know me are aware, I work at a video game development company. About a year and a half ago, I launched Gearblogs. The idea of a developer giving regular updates isn’t new. Generally, in the gaming industry, they are called Developer Diaries. I went with Gearblogs just to be a trend whore.

Anyway, we post to our diary/blog at least once a month. More specifically, our average is currently at 1.2 entries a month. The content is syndicated through RSS feeds and referenced in our forum community. Furthermore, each entry generally creates news hits (links) on various gaming websites.

The Traffic

While each entry pulls long term traffic, it’s a trickle. The real value comes with the intial posting. Most bloggers are already aware of this. In fact, I think the blog format tends to devalue older information to easily, but that’s another topic. Anyway, the other day I decided to really evaluate the traffic that these blogs pull in. The most important number to come from this is the average amount of hits each blog entry received:

11,000 hits per entry

The Analysis

So, how does that relate to $9,000+? Well, here’s how I got there… I hit Google Adwords and ran a slew of keyword related to our industry. The average cost per click came to $0.70. Thus, clicks by costs per click:

11,000 x $0.70 = $7,700

Remember from before, we’re posting 1.2 entries a month so:

$7,700 x 1.2 = $9,240

Conclusion

So what does this really mean? Simply put, if we were to PURCHASE the same traffic via ads such as Google Adwords, it would cost us an average of $9,240 each month.

There’s a lot more to consider here. For example, how much of this traffic comes from our community (already familiar with our brand) vs. new potential consumers? Keep in mind that our website simply serves to communicate with our customers. We do not have ads on our site nor do we directly sell a product on our site. That being the case, why would we ever actually spend money advertising our site?

Still, I thought it was an interesting way to look at the numbers. For a somewhat different website, this kind of thinking could heavily influence the bottom line.