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:
- High-level planning
- Find a content form that your audience will like
- Find a tone of voice
- Find a blog process
- Find a process to promote your blog after you’ve created something
- 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
- List what you can measure and where
- Page views / video watches / number of listens
- Make sure to check periodically. It’s kinda cool being able to say something like “we doubled our listeners this week”
- Make changes to your blogging that help you achieve your goals;
- Find ways to streamline or simplify sharing/promoting which will help in consolidating your data
- For example, if open rates for emails are low, consider changing your titles
- 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!