Yes, blog reporting is important
Unless you have some kind of weird form of social leprosy, it’s safe to assume no one really gets that turned on by doing blog reporting.
However, it’s what is needed the best content marketing strategy for your business.
Even if you want to know what’s going down in sales and content town, looking at your social media stats and Google Analytics gets a wee bit tedious after a while.
However, knowing how you are going and what your customers and readers like can help you form a game plan for the future, and inspire you when you simply don’t feel like writing anything.
So what’s the secret to exciting yourself about blog reporting? Apart from wanting to win the title fight for best content marketing strategy around, there are a few ways you can inspire yourself.
Treat it like you have a stable of fighters, each going for the title.
Here’s how:
Choosing your stable
You know that scene in Aliens where Ripley opens up the doors to pull the Queen alien out into space, almost sucking herself, Newt and Bishop along with it? You’ll probably suck harder than that when it first comes to your reporting. But as you go through the motions, you’ll get better at it. And the better you get, the more competitive you can make it.
What you need to do is really grab onto the content people respond to and get rid of the stuff no one cares about. You need to pick your winners and get rid of the losers.
Here are the steps to sound blog reporting:
- Setup Google Analytics and Twitter Analytics
- Start tracking Facebook (via Insights on your page)
- Start tracking Pinterest Analytics
- Add the analytics of any social media schedulers you use (e.g. Buffer, Hootsuite etc)
- Whack it all in a simple spreadsheet
- Set your target goals. There are a lot of crappy metrics out there, but what you want to aim for is anything that shows engagement. So click throughs and bookmarking show people want to read and keep your content
- Surprisingly, retweets, comments and shares (via direct social media) don’t mean as much as people don’t always read your content prior to commenting or sharing. Collect them, but aim for the clicks, bookmarks and comments on the actual blog as opposed to straight social proof
- Assemble a top 25 and put them in your spreadsheet
A word to the wise, don’t just focus on blog content. In the best content marketing strategy knowledge is power. You really need to know what pages are working on your website and which pages your audience doesn’t care about. This sort of information is readily available through Google Analytics and should be tracked so you can see what is and isn’t working on your main website.
You can add any other social, bookmarking or newsletter tools to this too, but for the start, let’s just keep it simple.
If they are the same 25, it means your social media and blog audiences are fairly similar. Or your promotion is lining up well. Or you have a giant fluke on your hands.
If they are a different 25, use this information to inform what works well across each platform and even pit those against each other by doing a little bit of A/B testing.
Stay inspired by tracking the social interaction. Shareaholic or similar WordPress plug-ins are great for this because you can see who’s actually socially endorsed your work at the end of each piece. Comments are also good.
But the real battle royal will come down to you and Google Analytics.
You need to dig deep and beat that sucker down into the shape you want. You can achieve this by:
- Building yourself a custom dashboard
- Check out what social influences your traffic
- Experiment with bookmarking tools
- Take a look at curation via Paper.li
- Know which articles attract the most hits from each channel
- Know what keywords bring your traffic to the website
If you view Google Analytics and your social media reporting as opponents to you winning the title blogging fight, you’ll be more inclined to take the time to get to know every inch of the journey your customers take to your blog.
Why blog reporting matters
The simplest reason why blog reporting should be undertaken and undertaken regularly is that you know what content works. Whether you blog to sell your freelance offerings, your business products or to make money as a blogger doesn’t matter. You need to have a handle on what works for you and your audience.
Knowledge is power. You can identify where your point of difference is in a market. You can discover the sought of style that people are attached to with your writing.
And you can stop producing blogs that don’t add anything to the work you do.
If you think you don’t have time for reporting, you have even less time for creating content that simply doesn’t work.
Go beyond the surface level appearances of popularity and truly discover what works. You could be pleasantly surprised.
And you may even find you enjoy it. I did!