How to Measure the Success of Your
Blog Strategy – Part 6
Having launched your blog do you have the right strategy? How can you measure the success of your blog
strategy? Never give up. The final part of this article today looks at
prioritising your efforts and being the King or Queen of content. Read on
and enjoy. Let me know how useful you
find this article and leave a comment below.
Hang in There!
We promise that it will be frustrating at first. But like any other
business success, it comes with trial-and-error. Stick with it.
Get some diverse, quality content out there, measure results, and see
what it’s telling you.
What do your top performing blogs have in common? Is it the same author,
subject, or tone? Are the calls to action at the end of these pieces similar,
or somehow more effective?
Prioritize Your Efforts
You’ve written content, got it published, measured and analyzed the
results.
Now you know what content performs the best for your brand, your market,
your area.
So, rinse and repeat!
Keep writing winning content. Keep measuring results. If the metrics
tell you it is getting less effective over time, then – and only then – do you
change.
That’s what we mean by being data-driven to save wasting energy.
Content Is King; Be
King of Content!
If you follow our guide to strategize and plan your marketing and
content, you can have success.
But to truly be a king or queen of content, you need to measure blog
success. That’s the only way to achieve a water-tight, idiot-proof,
Teflon-coated content marketing campaign.
It’s time to get the team together and get that blog strategy in place.
Want more expert business advice?
Visit our marketing blog!
How to Measure the Success of Your
Blog Strategy – Part 5
Having launched your blog do you have the right strategy?How can you measure the success of your blog
strategy? This article continues today by
looking at tools you can use and how to analyze and re-strategise. Read on and come back tomorrow to find out
more.Let me know how useful you find
this article and leave a comment below.
Tools You Can Use
There is any number of free tools
available online which will track the results of your content. One of the most
popular is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics can show month-by-month data on conversion rates,
demographics, and almost any other metric you’d want to consider.
Other free online tools can help you to publish your posts across
platforms. You can even schedule these in advance. That way, on Marketing
Monday you plan out the full week’s marketing drip-feed. This frees you to
focus on other aspects of the business the rest of the week.
Analyze and Re-strategize
A pitfall for many businesses is that they collect so much data, they
get overwhelmed and do nothing with it.
This is known as paralysis by analysis.
You can avoid it by sticking only to the data that is relevant to your
strategy. Then, strategize your analysis. What do we mean by that?
You should build marketing analysis points into your content plan. Each
month you write and publish content. Then, on a set date each month you measure
the results and use them to re-calibrate your strategy.
Maybe your content is attracting lots of people to your website, but
they’re not staying long, and they’re not buying anything. This might suggest
you’re attracting the wrong people, and need to change the tone or subject of your
content.
Perhaps you’re putting in back-links to competitors, inadvertently
sending your customers to buy elsewhere.
As you can see, this whole blogging concept takes a bit of
experimenting. It’s often best to work as part of a team so you can throw fresh
ideas around in those early, at times frustrating, days while you’re figuring
it all out.
How to Measure the Success of Your
Blog Strategy – Part 4
Having launched your blog do you have the right strategy?How can you measure the success of your blog
strategy? This article continues today by
looking at being data driven and what metrics to analyse for your marketing
strategy. Read on and come back tomorrow
to find out more.Let me know how useful
you find this article and leave a comment below.
Be Data Driven
There is any number of tools online that can help you measure the
success (or not) of your content campaign. Use them. We’ll look at some ideas
below.
The internet gives us the sort of sales data marketers could only dream
of thirty years ago! It can tell you the demographic breakdown of who visits
your site, who buys things, how long people spend on each page before they buy,
and so on.
Using that data wisely means calibrating your marketing efforts into a
lean, agile machine. No energy wasted. Imagine that!
Metrics Matter
You want to be data-driven to be agile. That means checking metrics and
analyzing Return on Investment (ROI). But what metrics should you track?
There is so much data available that it can be overwhelming. Tracking
all of it is an excellent way to fall into a rabbit hole.
Here’s a quick break-down of
the-what-and-the-why of some key marketing metrics you might want to analyze for ads you
embed in your content.
We strongly encourage you to have your marketing and content strategy in
mind when you select the metrics you will track, be they:
1.Ad Click Through – the rate at which those that saw your ad clicked on
it
2.Ad Conversion – the rate those that saw the ad bought r signed-up
3.Engagement Rate – the rate those that saw your post/ad reacted or shared
it on their own social media
4.Measure Success
Once you have measured content-specific metrics, such as page views or
page shares, it’s time to analyze ROI.
How much has it cost you to maintain the website, and get your content
written, edited, published and promoted? How much of this has resulted in sales
for the business?
From these figures, you can crunch some ROI figures for your business.
Some good ones to use are cost-per-visit, cost-per-click, and cost-per-lead.
Work out which ones are the best for your particular blog strategy, and
track all your content with the same metrics. That way, you can compare apples
with apples, as they say.
Consider the conversion rates, gross profit per month, average qualified
leads per month, and the average number of new customers per month.
Record them and analyze them against results from your content to see
what sorts of content get you the best sales results.
How to Measure the Success of Your
Blog Strategy – Part 3
Having launched your blog do you have the right strategy?How can you measure the success of your blog
strategy? This article continues today by
looking at how important plan it is to use the right platform you use on social
media and to really consider the desired end point of your content marketing
strategy. Read on and come back tomorrow
to find out more.Let me know how useful
you find this article and leave a comment below.
Platform Makes
Perfect
There are many types of blogs, each with their own individual flavor.
They all serve a different purpose. Your strategy will need to consider what is
the most effective for your brand and desired outcome.
Fashion pages or interior design business find great success with visual
platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. An effective cross-marketing strategy
links winning visuals with interesting, value-add content.
If you are promoting a management consultancy or legal advice, then
engaging and informative content that answers questions, or solves problems,
for your audience is a smart way to go.
Increasingly, businesses include video-logs embedded in their written
content as a way to boost SEO. It adds a personal connection for consumers. A
video can help people connect with you and your brand.
Some time-poor businesses take the
route of buying Content
Marketing Packages to make the job easier. There’s really no one
right way to go.
What’s the Point?
You know your target customer(s) and you know what sort of questions
they want yoboou to answer. Great! Your content will practically write itself.
But wait – you need to decide what the point of it is first!
Do you want readers to buy, or sign up for a newsletter, sign a
petition, or repost a sales promotion on their social media?
Knowing what the desired end-point of your content marketing strategy
is, is the key to success.
You need to know the destination if you’re gonna get there, right?!
Most blog strategies have more than one goal, in fact. Your primary goal
could be to sell, by becoming a trusted advisor. The secondary goal might be to
improve SEO, get more traffic to your website, or boost the number of email
addresses on your contact list.
How to Measure the Success of Your
Blog Strategy – Part 2
Having launched your blog do you have the right strategy?How can you measure the success of your blog
strategy? This article today will look
at your plan for success and your content marketing Blog 101 strategy. Read on and come back tomorrow to find out
more.Let me know how useful you find
this article and leave a comment below.
Plan for Success
A prize-winning cake only comes from a tried-and-tested recipe, and a
successful shopping trip relies on a grocery list.
Similarly, if you want success in your marketing efforts, you’ll need to
plan ahead.
There are three basic elements here:
1.Marketing Strategy – to plan
your overall sales goals, with your target customer(s) in mind
2.Content Strategy – mapping what information your
target customer(s) want, need and actively seek out
3.Content Plan – almost like a to-do list,
listing topic ideas, style notes, and specifying which employee or team is
responsible for what, with dates for submission, editing, publication,
promotion and results analysis
Of the three elements, you should focus most of your attention on the
Content Plan.
A successful blog strategy relies on getting content out there and
adjusting the program according to results. That’s why our advice is to get
your first iteration of topics to the market quickly, so you can measure
results and improve future content more quickly.
But before you jump to writing, make
sure you pass through the marketing and content strategies.
Blog Strategy 101
Blogs have come a long way since the 1990s. Then, they were often online
journals or travelogues.
Today’s blogs are closer to newspaper opinion pieces or magazine
content.
Word-of-mouth has always been one of the most reliable lead generators
for businesses. That’s because people like to buy from those they trust.
Content marketing relies on the same psychology. By giving you helpful
information on subjects of interest, the company becomes a ‘trusted advisor’,
and the customer feels more comfortable loosening those purse strings.
The other important factor to creating valuable content is that it
increases your ranking on search engines. The more effective content on the
subject you have, the more likely customers are to see your website when they
type a question about that product on Google.
Having launched your blog do you have the right strategy?How can you measure the success of your blog
strategy?This article will be in
six parts over the next few days.Read
on and find out more. Come back for more tomorrow. Let me know how
useful you find this article and leave a comment below.
How to Measure the Success of Your
Blog Strategy - Part 1
These days it seems the only marketing advice anyone gets is ‘start a
blog!’
And yes, we agree content marketing is effective. But deciding to have a
blog for your business is only the first step.
To be truly successful with your content, you need to measure results.
Measuring tells you when your strategy is spot-on. It lets you know when it’s
time to find a new one.
If you want effective content, learn how to measure blog strategy in our
guide below!
Is Content
Marketing Still a Thing?
All your marketing friends have been hailing content as king for a while
now.
And yes, content is still a big deal.
Almost 70% of people would rather hear about your
business from an article than an ad.
If you’re selling a service, a
product, or even an information campaign, content is still the best way to
connect with your consumer. Connecting with your consumer is still the best
way to sell to them. So, if you want sales; you’ll need a blog strategy.
Perhaps you’re a marketing manager wanting to modernize. You might be
part of a one or two-person operation, who needs to be on top of everything
from accounts and logistics to marketing.
Whatever the case, we’ve got
your content marketing strategy covered. Read on to learn
just what you’ll need to do to ensure success.
Are you making the most of RSS Feeds in marketing your
website? Here are some tips and tricks
to increase the popularity of your website.
Read on and let me know what you think with a comment below.
RSS Provides Multiple Opportunities to Share Your
Information
By: Michelle McClory
RSS content syndication is a relatively new member of the internet
marketing family of campaign options. And, it seems as though new uses for RSS
content are coming about very quickly. This is possibly due to recent changes
in the way that major search engines like Yahoo! and Google want web site
owners to advertise.
It seems like it shouldn't matter to the search engines - the way you choose to
market your website. But, it does when your link popularity begins to fall due
to too many links on irrelevant web directories, etc. With RSS content
syndication, you will not face that problem. And the better your content, the
better the chances of increasing your standing with the search engines (not to
mention your site visitors).
RSS feeds are no longer just appearing on the large news sites in order to show
the latest headlines. They are appearing on internet-enabled cell phones, PDA and
other mobile devices. The reason this is possible is the simple XML format used
to produce the RSS feed. By using RSS syndication to spread the word about your
site, you are now using one of the best advertising methods for reaching the
"non-traditional" web browsers installed on these mobile devices.
Anyone familiar with web directory will understand the approach recommended for
RSS syndication that I will term "many doors." The many doors
approach means that you are providing several different headlines for the SAME
article! If you have done directory submissions, or worked with a directory
submission service this is what you provided for anchor text and site
descriptions.
So, you can see that while some level of time investment will be required... you
will no longer need to generate huge numbers of SEO content in order to
"trick" the search engines. As a matter of fact, you will probably
want to concentrate your efforts on providing a few high-quality relevant
articles that will gain and keep the attention of your site visitors.
You will need to generate content an update your website frequently if you want
your RSS content syndication technique to be an effective form of marketing.
Why?
The answer is simple, but often overlooked by those publishing RSS content for
syndication. When site visitors become accustomed to looking at an RSS feed for
teasers about new information they can use, and they notice that there have not
been any new additions for a while they stop looking. If you decide that RSS content
syndication is a good marketing tool for your site, understand that you are
committing a small amount of time in order to draw and keep your web site
traffic.
How often will I need to update? That is a question frequently asked by those
new to the world of RSS marketing. It really depends on a few things. If you
are publishing content about developments in the stock market, your readers may
expect hourly updates. However, if you are publishing content on the week's
hottest new movies you could probably publish once a week and keep your readers
happy. Of course, if you are syndicating RSS content about new books written on
the topic of antique shoe stretches you may only need to publish content
annually. This also points out another thought to consider.
If your content is so specific that it applies only to a limited group of
people, then either RSS content syndication is not the right marketing
technique for your web site or you need to expand your content offerings. If
you find your website traffic lacking, why not try expanding your content to
include a broader audience?
When you publish content on your website that you want your visitors to see,
but you also want to make that same content available to others interested in
the same subject area, RSS feed services provide a great and inexpensive way to
expand your readership!
There are actually new search engines (Example, Feedster) that are in place
with the purpose of allowing people to search for syndicated content that can
be placed on their RSS feeds in order to provide a service to their web site
visitors. Because there is such a service, there must be a need for this type
of content! Therefore, listing your syndicated content with sites like Feedster
will enable other web site owners seeking your information to find it.
Here is a short overview of what you need to do in order to get your content
out there for RSS syndication:
First, you will need to compile a list of the content articles provided on your
website with their headlines, URL and description. From this list, you will
need to create a simple XML file (RSS format).
Second, you submit the XML file to services that make RSS syndicated content
available for other users.
Third, you wait for approval of your RSS feed from each of the services.
Fourth, after you are accepted by a site you need to find out how often they
will update their system with your latest XML RSS feed. You then need to ensure
that you are updating your information at the appropriate time!
Finally, you need to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor! This is when
you will begin to see increased traffic and sales to your site.
Author Bio
Michelle McClory is an online marketing expert with 5 years of experience who
is proud to be a member of the eByro team. If you would like to explore more
Internet Marketing techniques visit eByro - the Vertical Portal for Internet
Entrepreneurs at: www.ebyro.com
