In last week’s episode we talked about finding a content form that your audience will like, which is part of our 6 episode series on Blogging for Business. Just to mention those six topics, they are:

  1. High-level planning
  2. Find a content form that your audience will like
  3. Find a tone of voice
  4. Find a blog process
  5. Find a process to promote your blog after you’ve created something
  6. Measure blog effort: Find out if what you’re doing is actually any good

Today we will talk about finding ways to promote your blog content.

https://soundcloud.com/brandballers-podcast/measuring-your-efforts

The importance of measuring your efforts

  • Measuring gives you baselines that can lead your next steps. In sports we ask, “How did you play?”
  • There are many forms of measurement
    • Many are based on trying to determine ROI, or value of your posts
    • But we want to focus on metrics that work for us
    • Carl’s youtube videos: Likes and comments tell me that a video was effective
  • Performance Goals: Did you hit your goals that you set out to do?
    • If so, pat yourself on the back, but what can you learn to improve
    • If not, what caused you from reaching your goals / eliminate
    • Example: Standup meetings with Vitor – everyday we state what we did yesterday, what we will do today, and what is preventing us to reach our goals.
  • Promotional Efforts (Engagement) – are you being heard in your marketing channels.
    • Pages or video views / number of listens
    • And are there any indicators that certain channels are more effective than others.
    • With our podcast – we assumed that LinkedIn would be a top 3 place to promote our blog and create some engagement.
    • Turns out twitter and Product Hunt are my best social sharing channels
    • Carl: YouTube
      • Views, comments, likes tell me how much of an impact a video has
      • For example, presentation videos about starting a presentation get a much larger response than others
      • Opt ins on my website; am I seeing an increase in opt ins to my email list
      • Website views; increasing as I continue to post regularly
  • Important to remember: Blogging is a long game; short term spikes or gains aren’t necessarily as important as building an audience, laying down a foundation of value driven content and establishing your online presence
    • The numbers will come; yes, you need to promote, but consistency and high value will help you reach your blogging goals

Measure blog effort: Actionable steps to take away from podcast

  1. List what you can measure and where
    1. Page views / video watches / number of listens
    2. Make sure to check periodically. It’s kinda cool being able to say something like “we doubled our listeners this week”
  2. Make changes to your blogging that help you achieve your goals;
    1. Find ways to streamline or simplify sharing/promoting which will help in consolidating your data
    2. For example, if open rates for emails are low, consider changing your titles
    3. Example 2: Letting soundcloud share the podcast with the title they automatically generate; seems to get more listeners than creating our own tweets or promotion. Don’t get overly caught up in metrics; they are important but more important to be consistent and offer value in your blogging; know what your audience wants

Thanks for listening!

And that’s a wrap on our blogging for business podcast. Hope this has been helpful.

If you’d like us to touch upon a particular topic on an upcoming podcast, send us a message with your question or suggestion.

Have a great day!