When you’re blogging day in and day out, it’s easy to lose focus on the bigger picture of how your blog is performing.
It’s tempting to get caught up in cranking out post after post, checking items off a to-do list. However, if you don’t step back and regularly take a look at how your blog posts are doing, you may wake up one day and realize you just wasted a lot of time on content that’s failed to connect.
Keeping an eye on a range of blog metrics will help you figure out where you’re thriving and where you need to improve.
Recently, PR Newswire’s Beyond PR blog was ranked #1 on Inkybee’s list of the Top 60 PR Blogs in the World. (You should check the list out — there are a lot of blogs on it worth a read.)
Being included in such good company was not just an honor, it was also an excellent reminder of the importance of taking stock. Regardless of whether your blog is just starting out or has found its share of successes, you should always be searching out opportunities to grow.
Take a moment right now to think about your company’s blog. How can you improve in the following areas?
Visibility: On the surface, visibility is a straightforward metric. While you can start by looking at how many eyes are on your content, you need to look beyond the size of your readership. How are your subscriptions and authority metrics? How much traffic are you driving from search? Are others organically linking to and referencing your content?
Ultimately, you can gauge your visibility by looking at all of these factors and comparing them against your past progress and the visibility of other blogs within your niche.
Engagement: Getting visibility for your blog is an important step, but it’s only the first. Your content needs to connect and if the audience coming to your content isn’t engaging with it, you’re missing out.
Engagement can be gauged by the conversations you inspire. Social shares, likes, and comments are all helpful indicators for this.
Relevance: Although the number of overall engagements may be a nice number to show off, it’s the quality of them that will truly demonstrate how well your blog posts resonate with your audience.
What’s the general sentiment of the engagements? Do the tweets, comments, etc. demonstrate more than a cursory understanding of your content by your audience?
The quality of the conversation around your blog can keep you in check regarding how relevant you remain to them.
While every blog has multiple reasons for existing, serving your audience should be at the top of your blog’s list. That means focusing in on their needs and providing content which specifically addresses them.
You should be regularly auditing your content. What topics are you writing about? Are they in line with what’s going on in your industry and do they look ahead at what’s to come? Do you have enough content targeted for each of your blog’s audience personas?
If you find that you don’t have a good balance of content, start crafting blog posts that fill in the holes.
Impact on Business Goals: In the age of buyer 2.0, your content has the ability to not just connect with your current and potential customers, but also convert.
Visibility, engagement and relevance are essential metrics to track because when used together they can give you insight into your customers’ behavior, the topics that are important to them, and the ways they research and purchase products.
What content did members of your audience first touch that got them into your sales funnel? Are there specific blog posts or other pieces of content that push your prospects and leads to a successfully closed sale more quickly or frequently than other content?
Blogging can be a very impactful piece of your company’s overall marketing program, and employing a lead generation system with tracking links and thorough analytics will help you demonstrate your blog’s revenue and thought leadership contributions.
Data technology plays a huge role in validating and developing your content marketing efforts. Learn more by downloading our white paper The Modern Marketing Fulcrum: Balancing Content & Big Data to Power PR Results and view our companion infographic below:
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Blogging Metrics to Help You Validate and Improve Your Content Marketing
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