MackCollier.com

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Your Complete Guide to Creating Better Content For Your Business in 2017

Create better business content in 20172017 will be the year that brands and companies begin to seriously invest in their content creation efforts. We are already seeing major brands such as Cisco investing heavily in the hiring of content specialists and this will continue over the coming years. So now is a good time to start focusing on your existing content strategy and how to improve it moving forward.

A great way to get started is to audit your current content strategy. A content strategy audit is different from a simple content audit. A content audit typically focuses on engagement parameters only, whereas a content strategy audit analyzes your current strategy and measures actual results from your content strategy versus desired business outcomes.

Think of it this way: Your content is the stuff you create, your content strategy is what you hope will happen as a result of the stuff you create. For example, if you write 1 post a week for your blog, you can audit the engagement metrics associated with those blog posts, such as numbers of visitors, time spent on each post, social shares, etc. But if you audit that content in the context of a content strategy audit, you would analyze how that content led to other actions, such as number of white paper downloads, or times a lead-gen form was accessed, or number of email newsletter subscribers converted from that post.

For example, let’s look at the last post I wrote on this blog. If you just examine engagement around the post, you can see it did pretty well. It got over 200 social shares, and that’s not including shares on Twitter, which were probably another 200-300. So about 500 or so shares on social sites.

If my goal for this post was to simply generate engagement, then this post was a winner. It generated a lot of shares, a lot of chatter online, and gave my blog a 10-15% bump in traffic for a few days.

But if I want to look at this post from the context of how it impacts my overall content strategy, I have to dig a bit deeper. The end goal for my content isn’t simply to create engagement, I want to ultimately get business from the content I create. So engagement isn’t the end point, it’s closer to the beginning.

Think of how you would approach this if you owned a retail store in the mall. You send out a circular that announces the sales you’ll be running this weekend. That’s your ‘content’. You hope that ‘content’ will drive ‘engagement’, or in this case, people to your store. But the end goal isn’t simply to get people in the store, you want to sell them something.

So there’s a process that needs to happen:

1 – The circular or ‘content’ needs to drive people to the store
2 – Once inside the store, you need to convert them into customers

So if you approach your content in the same way, you need to first create content that drives engagement, but then that engagement needs to convert into a desired action.

Let’s go back to the last post I wrote here. We’ve already established that the post drove engagement, but we’ve also established that driving engagement wasn’t the ultimate goal of that post as part of my larger content strategy. I wanted that post to drive business for me.

So when I create the content, I position it so that it encourages the reader to engage in a desired action. For example, in the previous post, there was a pretty obvious call to action placed in the middle of the post in the form of this banner:

If you click on that banner, you are taken to the page that promotes my Content Strategy Audit service. So I want the content (post) to be engaging so that people read it, but once they arrive here, I want them to then click the Content Strategy Audit banner to go to that page. Then finally, I want them to contact me about purchasing a Content Strategy Audit.

Hit the bullseye with your business content in 2017So there’s three activities I want to track associated with this content:

1 – How many people viewed the content?
2 – After viewing the content, how many people then clicked on the banner and visited the Content Strategy Audit page?
3 – How many people after visiting the Content Strategy Audit page then inquired about purchasing the audit?

Looking at this list, you can see there’s three conversions that need to take place; You need to read the post, then once you arrive here you need to click on the banner ad for the Content Strategy Audit, then once you’re on that page, you need to email me to discuss buying the audit. Let’s take each one separately:

1 – How many people viewed the content? I’ve already stated that this particular post had higher than average social sharing, as well as traffic. So simply from an engagement standpoint, this post did its job.

2 – After viewing the content, how many people then clicked on the banner and visited the Content Strategy Audit page? I can check Google Analytics and find this information. But it’s worth noting that there are a lot of variables that can impact this on-site conversion. Maybe the banner would have converted better in a different location like at the end of the post. Maybe a different graphic would work better or maybe different wording. All of these variables must be considered and it pays to tweak things and see how conversion rates can be affected. I already have some ideas in mind for how I want to make some changes.

3 – How many people after visiting the Content Strategy Audit page then inquired about purchasing the audit? This is another conversion point. By clicking on the banner to come to the Content Strategy Audit page, you are assuming they are interested in learning more about the audit. How well this page converted into purchases of the audit gives me insights into whether or not the content of the Content Strategy Audit helped convert those visitors. So there are more variables that can be played with, such as giving more of an explanation of what’s included in the audit, or maybe less. Or maybe I could increase conversions by simply removing the price.

Now if all this seems like it’s getting a bit ‘in the weeds’, you’re exactly right. But, the bottom line is that if you truly want your content to be effective for your business, you need to invest the time to critically examining whether or not it is truly effective in helping you achieve desired outcomes for your business. As I’ve said before, engagement without desired business outcomes is just noise. Noise is easy to create and measure.

Meaningful outcomes are far harder to create, but create more impact for your business.

So when you audit your content strategy, you want to first decide What Is The Goal? Why are you making the time commitment to creating content in the first place? What are you hoping will happen? Create the goal first, then work backwards from the goal, creating content that will help you reach that goal.

For example, if the goal is to generate more product signups, then you need to create your content with that end goal in mind. You need to think about how your content will help move a visitor closer to wanting to singup for your product. You probably want to think about including relevant Calls to Action in your content that encourage the reader to signup for your product. I did this in the previous post by including both links and a banner ad that pointed to the page for my Content Strategy Audit. Because I wanted visitors to go to that page.

And before you think ‘All content needs to do is create engagment’, I beg to differ. I just did a search for Content Marketing Manager positions on LinkedIn. Here’s some of the job requirements that employers are demanding for these positions:

“to increase brand awareness, grow subscribers, and attract leads.”

“Develop and manage a global content strategy that drives XXXX’s brand awareness, website traffic, lead-generation efforts, and new customer acquisition”

“Accountable for all content marketing initiatives to drive traffic, engagement, leads, that deliver sales and customer retention.”

As you can see, most companies are expecting more than simple engagement from their content. They want that content to move people to perform specific actions. Think of it this way, let’s say you are a marketing agency, and you have a competitor that is also crafting a content strategy for 2017. If your content goals for 2017 are a 15% increase in ‘engagement’ and their content goals for 2017 are a 15% increase in leads generated, who do you think will have the better year? Probably your competitor, because their efforts are focused on creating content that comes closer to impacting that agency’s bottom line.

Now at this point you may be thinking “But Mack in your previous point you said that you can’t create content that ‘sells’ if the customer isn’t ready to buy, and now you’re saying that good content should do more than just create engagement. Which is it?” My point is that your content should aspire to a higher purpose than simply creating engagement.

Remember the AIDA model from your college marketing classes? AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. You make the customer aware of your business, you get them interested in learning more about who you are and your products, which creates a desire to own those products, and that leads to a purchase (action). Your content needs to be positioned so it can move the potential customer through the buying process. Many businesses focus on creating content that builds awareness, that establishes thought leadership and that helps get the ‘name’ of the business out there.

But then what? Creating content that builds awareness is fine, but what about the next step? What about creating content that builds interest? And if you can get me interested in your products and services, I might become interested in actually buying those products and services. Your content needs to be there to hold my hand and move me closer to a purchase.

Now as part of your content strategy, you may find that certain tools or platforms are best suited for creating and housing different types of content. For example, you might use the content on your blog primarily as a way to build awareness for your business. Then maybe you then move those customers to another tool or channel to build their interest and to ‘close the deal’.

However, none of this will happen until you make a commitment to get serious about your content strategy in 2017. That means taking the time to put together a strategy, to decide what it is you want to accomplish, then executing that strategy. Then along the way you can continually audit your efforts so you know if you are making progress or not, and adjust as needed.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Engagement without desired business outcomes is just noise. ” quote=”Remember, engagement without desired business outcomes is just noise. “]

 

The Importance of Topic Buckets

I’ve written here before about Topic Buckets and why they are so important. Topic Buckets are the 2-3 areas that your content will focus on that are associated with your business. Think of Topic Buckets as your business’ elevator speech. If you meet someone in the elevator and they ask you what your business does, what would say? Think about the 2-3 areas that you would want your business to be known for. Those are your Topic Buckets. You should try to fit every piece of content you create into one of your Topic Buckets. This brings clarity and focus to your content creation, but it also helps to establish your business’ association with these 2-3 areas. By constantly creating content that’s focused on your 2-3 Topic Buckets, you are helping others to understand what your business is about and what it does. Additionally, you are helping to establish your expertise around these areas.

For example, this post is focused on Content Strategy, which is one of my Topic Buckets. This is a very long and in-depth post that is written to help companies create better content strategies in 2017. I want to be known as someone that can help companies create better content strategies, so I wrote a very detailed and instructional post that will teach companies how to do exactly that. Ideally, this post will help establish my expertise in helping companies create amazing content strategies. The added bonus for me is that it will help others understand what type of work I do, which can lead to more referrals.

But honestly, at the end of the day this post is nothing more than a commercial for my consulting services. However, I purposely did not write this post to be an advertisement, because very few people want an advertisement. They want content that creates value for them. So if I can write a 3,000 word post on how to create better content in 2017, that creates value for the reader. Which means I can gain the reader’s attention, and once I have their attention, I have a chance to convert them in some way that I’ve determined has value for me. Notice there are multiple links back to my Content Strategy Audit page. Those are there as a reference point within the post, but are also included because I hope people will click the link and check out that service. This is because I am always viewing my content as being promotional and thinking about how I can add relevant Calls to Action within each post.

You should approach your content in the same way. You should understand that your content is there to promote your business, but you should at the same time understand how to promote your business in a way that also creates value for your audience. This is why the concept of Topic Buckets are so important, because it allows you to focus your content creation efforts on 2-3 areas that relate to your business. And if you approach your content as being promotional while also creating value for the reader, you will create content that promotes the topic areas that are relevant to your business.

Or if this whole idea of creating content that promotes your business makes you feel icky, think of it this way: If you have created great content, you have earned the right to ask for something from your reader. Remember the PBS pledge drive example in my previous post. PBS aired a wonderful live concert of The Highwaymen, it was great content that I loved, so I didn’t mind a few short breaks within that 90-minute performance from PBS asking for donations. PBS earned the right to ask for donations by providing amazing content.

Your focus should be the same, especially if you feel uncomfortable ‘asking for the sale’. Simply create amazingly valueable content and not only will you have earned the right to promote yourself, the odds are your audience will WANT that promotion. If I stumble across a site that creates value for me around a topic I am interested in, what will I do? Subscribe to new content from that site. I am communicating to that site that I want to get new content from them as soon as it is available. Whenever we interact with someone that creates content that has value for us, we want more. I know this from my own experience as a content creator. Whenever I create a piece of content that’s very popular and well received, I see an increase in traffic from that content to the following pages:

1 – My bio. People that have never read my content before want to know who I am.

2 – My Buy Think Like a Rock Star page. People that find value in my post become interested in buying my book.

3 – My Speaking and consulting services pages. People that find value in my post become interested in hiring me as a speaker or consultant.

No doubt, you have seen the same thing whenever you create content that is popular with your readers. This indicates that IF you have created content that’s valuable to your readers, then those readers are more OPEN to promotion from you. In fact, if you have positioned your content correctly, a relevant Call to Action (such as asking for a download of a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter or buying a product), should be expected and WELCOMED by your readers. So just think about that as you are creating content, you want your content to promote your business, but you also want that content to be so insanely valuable for your readers that they don’t mind the the promotion, they even welcome it.

Before I wrap up this post, a final word on why Topic Buckets can be so helpful to your content strategy. Remember that Topic Buckets are really the 2-3 things that you want to be known for. Once you have decided what the Topic Buckets are for your business, ideally you should then prioritize these Topic Buckets. So you know what Topic Bucket is most important to your business, then you can rank the others after that.

Additionally, having Topic Buckets helps you better organize your content calendar. For example, let’s say you have 3 Topic Buckets. If you have an editorial calendar that requires one new blog post per week, then you could write a new post on each of the 3 Topic Buckets, and the 4th post could be on the Topic Bucket that you prioritize as being the most important to your business. This instantly solves the ‘what will I write about?’ problem because you know to write about your Topic Buckets. You just pick which Topic Bucket each post is about, and go from there. So it greatly simplifies the writing process from the standpoint of picking your topic. Which, if you’re like me, if often the biggest issue you face when writing a new post. Using Topic Buckets has greatly helped me with this, and I believe it help you as well.

The Checklist You Need For Each Piece of Content You Write

1 – Remember the goal for your content strategy. Every piece of content you create should be associated with that goal. If your goal is to generate sales, then your content needs to be created in that context. If your goal is to build brand awareness or to establish thought leadership, create your content with that focus. Remember the saying ‘Begin with the end in mind’ because it applies here.

2 – What Topic Bucket does this piece of content fit in? Figure out the 2-3 things that you want to be known for, and try your best to make sure that every piece of content you create fits into one of these Topic Buckets. Also, prioritize your Topic Buckets so that you cover each and also focus more on the ones that are most important to your business.

3 – Create content worthy of the ask. Get in the habit of viewing the content you create for your business as being promotional, but do so with the understanding that it must also create value for the reader, or else you’ve wasted both your time and the readers’. Remember the PBS pledge drive example; Strive to create content that’s earned the right to ask for a donation. If you truly create great content that’s valuable to your readers, they will WANT to get more information about that topic, or they will want to sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your content, or buy your product. Remember, the value you create IS the promotion. Think about what value each piece of content creates for the reader, and how that will ultimately create value for your business as well.

4 – Carefully consider your Calls to Action. This ties in with the above point especially. Create content that’s worthy of the ask, then carefully ask for the exact thing you want, that’s also relevant to the content you have created. Should every piece of content you create include a Call to Action? Not necessarily, but every piece of content you create should be worthy of you asking for something in return from the reader. Maybe it’s something as simple as asking them to visit a page, or leaving a comment. Maybe it’s directly promoting a product or service you provide. But the idea is to think more carefully and deliberately about not only the content you create but the time you are asking your readers to invest in consuming that content. If you have created value then you have earned the right to ask for something.

5 – Understand how you will measure the success of each piece of content you create. If you are writing a blog post, think about what needs to happen in order for you to realize that the time you spent on that post was worth the effort. Know what KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you and your boss will use to judge the effectiveness of each piece of content. This is also useful to keep in mind as you create the content because it will help you create the content in such a way that relevant KPIs are impacted by the content.

Write better content in 2017 with Ommwriter

Finally, I wanted to close this post by letting you know about a very cool writing tool I just discovered from Peter Shankman’s blog. This tool is OmmWriter. It is designed to minimize distractions when you write so you can better focus. When you run OmmWriter, it takes over your screen so all you are left with is a blank screen with a background that you set (I prefer the snow scene). All system notifications are turned off so there’s no distractions. Additionally, several musical tones are provided (I prefer #5) that really help me get sucked into the writing and it also helps with focus.

Case in point, this is the first post I’ve written while using OmmWriter, and it is going to end up being around 4,000 words. Prior to this, the longest post I had ever written in 11 years of blogging was right at 2,000 words. I found it much easier to focus and just ‘get in the flow’ and write more in less time with OmmWriter. Now it does have a few obvious limitations to discuss. First, you can’t insert images or a lot of special formatting so you can’t just write a finished post with OmmWriter. You’ll still have to do some editing and formatting before it’s ready to publish. And it’s not free, although you can buy it for as low as $5.11, that’s the minimum price you can pay and the creators of OmmWriter let you decide what you will pay.

So definitely try out OmmWriter and I hope you love it as much as I do. My problem has always been that it takes me way too long to write a really good blog post. My ideas seem to come in spurts, and it often takes me 5-6 hours to write a substantial 1,000 word post. I wrote this post in about 4 hours, and it’s right at 4,000 words. OmmWriter really helped me focus and write more in less time. Here’s the link to check it out, and I’m not getting a penny from them, just wanted to share a really cool writing tool that I think you’ll love.

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How to Write Your First Blog Post

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Recently a friend asked me a question that any business that begins blogging will have to answer; What should your first blog post be about?  That first blog post is terribly important, because it sets the tone for the blog. Not just for the readers, but for the writers as well.

From the reader’s point of view, I would want to see four areas covered in your first blog post:

1 – Who you are. Tell me about your business, but also introduce me to the blog’s writers.  Share pictures.  The more information about yourself and your business that you share, the easier it will be for me as a reader to trust you.  This is very overlooked by many businesses but we want to see pictures of the people that work for your business and more importantly, those that will be writing for the blog.  It helps us identify and connect with them!

2 – Why you are blogging. Possibly the most important question you can answer, because it will force you to spell out your intentions to your audience.  And as always, consider your audience when answering this question, ask yourself, ‘Why would someone come to this blog, what would they be looking for?’  Hint: They won’t be coming to your blog so that you can market to them.  Maybe you want to share your thoughts on your industry with your readers, or maybe you want to teach them how to do a certain set of skills that tie into your business.  Another way to think about this is to ask yourself ‘What’s in it for the reader?’

3 – What will you be blogging about.  Answering the above question makes this one much easier to answer.  Will you be blogging about your business, or perhaps the lifestyles of your customers?  Spell out the content on your blog so that I know what to expect when I arrive.  And remember that this will also serve as a ‘bookmark’ for your writers to keep them focused on what the goal of your blog is.

4 – How I can leave feedback. Tell me how I can be involved.  Can I leave comments?  Do you encourage comments?  What if I want to email you?  Spell out exactly how I can contact you, and don’t be afraid to encourage feedback, and even disagreement.  In fact this would be a good place to formally spell-out your comment policy, which again can serve as a reference tool for your writers as well.  But do everything you can to make sure that my feedback is appreciated, and encouraged.  If possible, give readers ways to contact you online (such as an email address) and offline (such as your address and phone number).

If your first blog post contains these elements, your business blogging efforts will be off to a fine start!

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Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have

Understanding the Ten Elements Every Company Blog Should Have

Social media sites come and go (Remember Google Plus and Friendfeed?), but a company blog remains one of the best tools available to drive organic traffic to your website. A company blog lets you promote your business, introduce yourself and your employees to the world, and gives you a place to provide valuable information to your customers.

Thinking about launching a company blog? Great, now if you want to avoid being “that guy,” then here’s the essential elements that you should incorporate into your blog.

1 – A strategy. Why are you blogging? What are you attempting to do with your blog? Establish your company as an industry leader? Boost your brand awareness? Provide customer service? Know what you want to accomplish with your blog, and make sure that your goals are consistent with your overall business strategy.  This post goes in-depth into creating a solid content strategy for your blog.  Once you’ve created your blogging strategy, make sure every member of your content team understands what that strategy is. Every content creator you work with will need to intimately understand your blogging strategy. It will make their jobs much easier, and they will create better content as a result.

2 – A dedicated group of bloggers. If you only have one blogger, or if you have five, every blogger needs to know what is expected of them, and what their role is. If each blogger needs to write 2 posts a week, they have to be willing to give you 2 posts a week.  Keep in mind when setting your team and expected goals, that it’s better to start with less and then grow as the skills and familiarity of the team improves. For example, it makes more sense to start with asking 3 new posts a month from each writer, then after a couple of months you may want to increase the rate for each writer up to 5 new posts a month. Starting small and growing makes more sense than taking on too much right out of the gate.

3 – A posting schedule. This ties in with #2. Ideally, a company blog should have at least 1 new post a week. Make sure each blogger knows how many posts a week/month they are responsible for, and have the posts up on a set pattern. Don’t have the bloggers put them up whenever inspiration strikes, that’s how you end up with 2 posts a week; one on Thursday night at 10:46pm, the other on Sunday at noon. Set up your posts to run in the middle of the week, and then move outward. Tues, Weds, and Thursday are usually the best days for traffic, so schedule posts to run these days, usually around 10am-noon.

Remember, it’s more important to keep to a set schedule, than it is to post more often. Creating and keeping a regular schedule trains readers to know when to expect new content from your blog. This helps drive engagement and traffic.

4 – A comment policy. Do you moderate? If so, how long does it take to approve comments. When Shelia leaves a comment at 3am Saturday morning, will it be noon on Monday till it’s approved? You need to know this. For extra credit, list it on the blog itself.  Keep in mind that you are under NO obligation to let stand ANY comment that personally attacks any of your writers or any of your writers. Challenging ideas presented is fine, but if any comment attacks or attempts to bully either a writer or reader, feel free to delete the comment without prejudice. Your house, your rules.  In fact, if you want to turn off comments entirely, that’s totally fine.

5 – An ‘About Us’ section. Tell me who you are, what you do, and how I can get in touch with you. It’s best to include an email address AND a phone number.  Yes, people still like to reach you via a phone call. For extra credit, add a section explaining what your blog is about.

6 – Pictures and bios for EVERY blogger. Again, this is non-negotiable. I need to be able to SEE who every blogger is, and I need to know their background. Simply seeing the face of the bloggers writing for your blog makes it much easier to trust and relate to the writers. Really.

7 – A clear Call to Action. You want to direct your readers to engage in some type of action.  Maybe you want them to download your new white paper, or signup for a product trial. Perhaps it’s simply asking them to call you, but you should have some type of Call to Action. Notice at the top right of this blog I have Calls to Action asking you to hire me to speak, or check out my LinkedIn profile, or read my recent posts. You need to give your readers an action to take.

8 – Ask for subscribers. Give your readers a way to subscribe to your blog, via a feed reader, or email. Feedburner can help you set up both, go to Feedburner.com and set yourself up a free account, if you haven’t already.

A small section explaining what RSS is and the advantages of subscribing would be a nice touch as well.  Also, if your company has a newsletter, you can promote it to subscribers as well.

9 – A section for Recent Comments. This isn’t a ‘must have’, but it’s a really nice way to put the focus on your readers, and it also gives them an idea of which posts are getting the most attention. If you aren’t really interested in getting comments on your posts then you could focus on something else like your most popular posts or promote your company website.

10 – A personal touch. Be human. Refer to commenters by name. Say ‘thank you’ early and often. Ask for feedback, and opinions. Remember that ultimately, people don’t want to connect with companies, we want to connect with people.

What did I miss? If your company blogs, what are some other elements that you believe are vital to your blogging efforts? Which of these are most important?

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My Guide to Writing Totally Awesome Blog Posts Every Single Time

5003010775_55c8701deb_zOne of my pet peeves in #Blogchat is when we are discussing how to create engaging content or how to grow readership and someone will tweet ‘just write awesome posts!’

Yeah, because it’s that easy.

It’s like saying that the solution to losing weight is to ‘eat less, exercise more’.  Want more readers?  Write awesome content.

But we still haven’t addressed how to do this.  How do you write totally awesome blog posts that readers will love?

That’s what this blog post is for, to share with you all the things I’ve learned from blogging for the last 12 years.

Prep before you start writing the post

Before you start writing your post (and this is something you should do for every post you write), ask and answer these three questions:

1 – Who am I writing this post for?  Be as specific as possible.  Is it for companies wanting to learn how to better leverage social media marketing in the hospitality industry, is it for cross-stitchers in New England or single dads that own dachshunds in Oregon?  Know who you are writing for.

2 – What do they get from reading this post?  Are you trying to inform them?  Teach them a skill?  Entertain them?  Shock them?  Know who your readers are and know why the post you are about to write is of value to them.

3 – What do YOU get from writing this post?  How does this post benefit you, the writer?  This is important because while you need to make sure the post has value for the reader, you also need to make sure that you know what you want from it as well.  For example, I am writing this particular post in a very specific manner to test a new online content marketing tool.  Know what you want to accomplish with each post you write.

Elements you need for a totally awesome blog post

First, you have to nail the post headline.  This has become increasingly important in recent years since so much activity on Facebook and especially Twitter is now simply linking to other blog posts.  We are all sharing our favorite blog posts, and typically all we are sharing is the title of the post and its URL.  On top of that, we are all scanning our Newsfeed or list of tweets from the people we follow.

So at best, your headline has about 2 seconds to grab the attention of others and get them to click on the link.  So you need to craft a killer headline that immediately gets attention.

But writing a great post headline is an art in and of itself.  Here’s some tips:

Make sure the headline doesn’t simply summarize the post.  This is probably the biggest mistake bloggers make, they simply let the headline summarize the post, almost as if the headline is an afterthought.  For example, let’s say you write a very detailed blog post on a 10-step process for building more engagement on a blog.  Which headline is more likely to get you to click on it:

1 – Building blog engagement (Summary of post)

2 – 10 Steps You Can Use To Start Building More Engagement On Your Blog TODAY! (Specific)

It’s probably going to be the 2nd choice, because it’s more specific, and you have a better sense of exactly what the post covers.

Make a specific claim with your headline.  In the 2nd example above, the headline tells you that it will not only show you how to create more engagement on your blog, but it also promises to give you a 10-step process that you can begin implementing immediately to build engagement on your blog.  In other words, you have a better sense of what the post is about, based on the specific headline.  Tell potential readers exactly what they are getting if they read your post.

Make a specific claim with your headline then back that claim up in your post.  Nothing is worse than clicking a link based on an awesome headline, then the post ends up being 250 words of fluff, or worse a thinly veiled sales pitch.  I made a specific claim in the headline because I wanted to force myself to have to write a comprehensive and complete guide.  For example, right now we’re already at the 700+ word count for this post and we haven’t even got into the writing of the post itself yet.

Writing the totally awesome blog post

First, let’s discuss the proper length for an awesome blog post.  There’s no one right answer to this, many people will swear by shorter posts, but it’s more difficult to truly make an impact in 200 or 300 words.

So my advice when it comes to ideal blog post length is to use as many words as you need, but edit relentlessly.  If you want to write a 2,000 word post fine, but keep in mind you are asking a lot of your readers to hold their interest that long.  So edit, edit, edit.

Proofread your post.  See if you have repeated any points or ideas that can be removed.  Make sure you are using clear language.  The idea is to strip out all of the filler so that you are left with a lean post that’s value-packed.  You don’t want to go into writing your post thinking “I can’t go over 500 words!’  Write the post you want to write and with the words you want to use.  Then go back and see if it needs to be shortened via editing.

What type of post should you write?

1 – The How-To Post.  This is my personal favorite (this post is an example of this type), because you are teaching others a valuable skill.  The more valuable that skill is, the more likely that your content will be shared.  Additionally, teaching others a valuable skill helps establish your expertise.

The key with these types of posts is to make the information easily digestible and organized in a clear manner.  Basically you need to give your readers a roadmap.  This is why ‘X Steps to’ type posts are so popular, because people want to know the exact steps that they need to follow in the exact order.

There’s two approaches to the How-To post.  The most obvious is to teach readers a skill that they want to learn.  The problem here is that more than likely there are many posts about this same topic.  So you need to do a better job than the competition.

The second type of How-To post is to teach readers a skill that they don’t know they need.  Sites like Lifehacker are great for teaching you how to do things that are useful, such as filling up a bucket with your sink faucet and a clean dustpan.

You can also curate how-tos into a larger post or series as well.  Length is again an consideration, but as long as the additional tips are valuable you’ll be fine.

2 – Raising awareness about an idea or a belief.  With this type of post, the idea is to share your passion and to make sure that your readers share that passion, or at least are moved to respond based on their passion for you and your passion.  You need to clearly articulate to your readers why this idea is worth their attention.  Also, it helps to give them a clear and easy way to become involved.  An example might be to show your readers that a problem exists, and then explain to them how solving that problem would lead to a better outcome for them.  Then show them how their involvement can help you solve that problem.

3 – The Research-based post.  These types of posts are often very time-consuming, but the payoff can be huge if you can create a research/fact-based post that is valuable for your readers.  The most popular post I have ever written here was this post on how much social media costs companies.  It currently has over 100,000 page views, but it also took me over three months to write.  I interviewed over a dozen social media consultants, agencies and companies to learn what they charged for social media marketing services, plus I researched what similar consultants, agencies and companies were charging for their own services.  I wrote this post because I knew from talking to clients and companies that there was great demand for guidance on how much basic social media marketing services cost.  You can do the same thing by first identifying a question that a lot of people have, then finding the answer and sharing it with your readers.

4 – The Rant.  This type of post is pretty self-explanatory, and for me at least, has been completely hit or miss.  The key to an effective rant is to hit on a topic that’s relevant to a lot of people.  You want to elicit an ‘Amen!’ or ‘I know exactly what this guy means!’ type of response.  That prompts others to share your post.  Often, a blogger will say that their ranty posts are the ones that they never thought would be popular, but often are.  And then leads to a final point about writing an awesome post….

Whatever you write, write it with passion.  Passionate writing is always more interesting.  We want to read your emotions in your posts.  If you can’t get excited about the topic then you can’t expect your readers to either.

Bloggers are always lamenting that “All the topics have been covered to death, what is there left for me to write about?”

It’s not about writing about something new, it’s about writing in your voice and with your passion.  That’s truly the key to creating awesome blog posts.

 Wait, you need an awesome visual!

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An awesome visual to go with your awesome post is imperative to ensuring that your content spreads.  Ideally, the visual will expand on and enhance the post itself.  But there’s no substitute for a killer visual when it comes to attracting attention.  If you have an eye-catching visual and an attention-grabbing headline, then you’ve already won half the battle.

When using pictures, you first need to consider copyright and if it’s legal for you to use someone else’s work.  Luckily, I’ve already written a post on using other people’s pictures, so just click over here to read everything you need to know.

There are plenty of sources you can use for legit pictures but my favorite is the Flickr photos that are licensed with the Attribution License via Creative Commons.  These are pictures that the owner has said you can use and even adapt, as long as you attribute who the owner of the work is.  And Flickr currently lists over 55 Million photos with this license, so the odds are you can find an awesome image for your photo.

Another way to incorporate visuals into your post is to include charts and graphs that support the idea of your awesome post.  This ties in with the idea of the research-based post.  Often research firms and agencies such as Forrester or HubSpot will release their own research study, and with it include charts and graphs that you can use for free.  Obviously they want you to blog about their report, but you can take those charts and graphs and use them as visuals for your own posts.  Also remember that this helps your readers understand and process the information you are sharing with them, and in a new form (visual).

Finally, don’t forget about video!  It’s now painfully easy to embed a video from YouTube and other video-sharing sites.  Plus the additional benefit to you (assuming you pick an interesting video) is that readers will at least spend the amount of time on your post that it takes them to watch the video.  And the more time they spend with your content the more likely they will enjoy it (again assuming that you’ve written useful and valuable content for them!).

If you can give your readers information in multiple contexts and forms, it can help them learn the core lesson you are trying to teach them.

The Formula For Writing an Awesome Blog Post Every Single Time

1 – Do the prep work beforehand.  Figure out who you are writing for, why the post will be valuable for them, and also determine why the post will be valuable for you.

2 – Write an amazing headline.  The post’s title needs to immediately grab the attention of potential readers, and be as specific as possible.

3 –  Post length is optional, but in general don’t make the post any longer than it needs to be.  Make sure you proofread and edit your post before publishing it (I often forget to do this!).

4 – Decide what type of post you want to write, and make the information easy for your readers to digest and absorb.  Again, my personal favorite is the How-To post because you are teaching your readers a specific skill.

5 – Pick awesome visuals to go along with your awesome post.  Remember that your content is being shared on other sites like Facebook and Plus, where the picture you add to the post will be shown.  If the image is eye-catching, that simply increases the chances that your post will be read.

6 – Write with passion.  If you aren’t excited about the topic then your readers won’t be excited about the post.  Passionate writing is more interesting writing, you want the readers to be able to feel the passion you have for that particular topic.  Because passion inspires us.

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10 Things You Can Do TODAY to Make Your Blog Better

Skiing Towards the Sun

Ready to take your blog to the next level?  Here’s 10 things I have learned about making my blog better over the last 13 years.

Blog Maintenance

1 – Sign up for Google Analytics.  This will give you valuable information about the health of your blog.  I use it every single day to see how traffic is doing here, specifically Real-Time and referral sources.  It’s great to track what content is resonating with your readers.  Plus, if you ever want to bring on ads or sponsors for your blog, they will want to know your blog’s stats tracked via Google Analytics.  Plus it’s free, so get it today.

2 –  Get the right plugins that add functionality for you and you readers.  Here’s three of my favorites and make sure you add Akismet to block spam.  And most importantly, make sure all your plugins and WordPress are updated as soon as available.  Outdated plugins are the first thing hackers look for on your blog, so simply keeping everything updated will make your blog far more secure and if you are vigilant about it, that alone could be enough to keep your blog from ever getting hacked.

Blog Strategy 

3 – Nail down your audience. No more of this ‘I’m just writing to share my voice’.  That’s lazy, figure out WHO you want to share your voice with.  The exact person.  Do that and you can give them the message that’s relevant to them, and you’ll be more likely to earn their attention.

4 – Figure out your reader’s journey.  Mapping the ‘customer’s journey’ is a buzz-term in business right now, similarly, you need to think about the path your reader takes on and off your blog.  Think about the actions they are taking, and the actions you want them to take.

5 – Factor in content placement and blog design.  With the former point, think about the actions you want the reader to take, and organize your blog so it is easier for your readers to take those actions.  For example, my primary audience here is people working in marketing and social media for brands.  The primary actions I want them to take is to sign up for my newsletter, and read my content on brand advocacy.  So notice that my newsletter signup and recent posts on Brand Advocacy are both featured at the top of the blog, where they will be the most visible.

Content Creation  

6 – Nail your headlines.  Of all the tips in this list, this is the one that can instantly boost your readership the most.  I’ve written before about the importance of writing a great headline and how to do so.  Don’t think about how your headline will read here on this blog, think about how it will read on Twitter or Facebook.  That’s the test, consider if you glanced at your headline on Twitter for 2 seconds, would the headline alone prompt you to click the link?  If not, then it’s a bad headline.  However if you do click and then the post doesn’t back up the headline, that’s even worse.  So you want to have a headline that instantly grabs attention and makes me want to click the link, but also the content has to back up the claim or statement made by the headline.  Don’t summarize the post, make a specific claim or statement with the headline that grabs my attention.

7 – Create reader-centric content.  Don’t focus on blogging about your business (or the business you want to build) instead blog about ideas and themes that are relevant to your desired audience.  For example, Patagonia has a fabulous blog for their customers.  But at The Cleanest Line, Patagonia doesn’t blog about its clothing, it blogs about ideas and themes that are relevant to its customers.  Such as sustainability, protecting the environment, and being active outdoors.  Patagonia does this because the brand understands that creating reader-centric content means creating more interesting and relevant content for its customers.

8 – Get on a regular posting schedule.  All things being equal, the blog that publishes more content will have a higher readership.  So if you want to create and publish more content, a great way to do this and cultivate your readership is to get on a regular posting pattern.  If possible, start out shooting for at least one new post a week, and pick the same day to publish that post.  Wednesday, Saturday, it doesn’t matter as long as you make it the same day.  Then try to grow from that to 2 posts a week, then maybe 3.  But if you can only write 4 posts a month, I would rather see you spread out those 4 posts as one each Wednesday versus publishing a post the 1st week of the month then none for the next 2 weeks then 3 posts in the final week of the month.  Getting on a regular posting schedule trains your readers to know when to expect new content and helps grow your readership.

9 – Engage your readers.  ‘How do I get more comments?’ is one of the biggest challenges most bloggers have.  The quickest way to get more comments?  Actually REPLY to the ones you get!  Now granted you don’t need to reply to every single comment but if you did, you just doubled the number of comments on your blog.  And your replies will lead to more comments.  More importantly, if your readers know you will reply if they comment, that makes them more likely to comment.

10 – Pay more attention to your audience than the ‘experts’.  Case in point, you’ll hear all day that people hate list posts like this.  The more advanced bloggers will look down their noses at them and tell you to stop writing them that they want content that’s more advanced.  That’s because they are more advanced.  Every one of them LOVED the ‘listicles’ when they started blogging because they needed posts exactly like this.  So if you are writing for more advanced bloggers, then you need to provide them more 201 and 301-level content.  But if you are writing for beginning bloggers, guess what?  You need to give them 101-level content, and don’t listen to the more advanced bloggers that want more advanced content.  Because they aren’t your audience.

 

 

What did I miss?  Add them in the comments, please!

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The Key Difference Between Your Blog and Other Social Media Channels That Most Companies Miss

Your blog is where people meet youYour blog is where people meet you.

Your social media channels are where they seek you out.

It’s important to understand these differences because they necessitate adjusting your social media strategy accordingly.

Let’s use Twitter as our social example.  On Twitter, people are sharing your content and it’s where people are going if they have a customer service issue or a question for you.  They are more likely to want to connect with you on the sites they are already using, like Twitter, versus coming to your blog or site.  They are also more likely to know you because how would they know to connect with you at all?

On your blog, a good portion of your traffic is coming from search engines.  So many people are clicking on a link from Google, and then being sent to your blog, probably for the first time.  This is where people meet you.

So if you think about how people are interacting with you via social and your blog, you can see that you are dealing with slightly different audiences.  And you can even expand this to include newsletters, where people already know you, and want to develop a deeper connection with you.

Let’s think about how we are talking about slightly different audiences:

Social – People that are aware of you, that are following you or seeking you out.

Blog – Some people that also follow you on social, but also people coming from search who are likely being introduced to you (and your content) for the first time.

Newsletter – People that know who you are, and who enjoy your content so much that they will give you access to their inbox in order to get it as soon as its available.

Or put more simply:

Social – People that know of you.

Blog – Strangers.

Newsletter – Friends and fans.

Granted, that’s not a perfect representation and I can already hear some of you howling “But my friends all read my blog!”  True, but look at your blog’s traffic from search.  Almost all of that is coming from people that have never visited your blog before, and if your blog is older than 6 months, the odds are that at least half its traffic is coming from search.  For older blogs like this one, that percentage can go over 75%.

So each channel is a slightly different audience and requires slightly different approaches to your content.  Here’s how I tweak my content strategy for each channel:

Blog – This is where I create content based on the topics I want to be known for.  I assume that you are visiting here for the first time, so I am sharing what I know and more importantly, what I want to be known for.  It’s also used as my best channel for establishing thought leadership, since blog content will stay seeded in search engines.

Social – This is where I interact with people that know of me around topics that I am passionate about.  It helps us develop deeper connections plus to some extent it drives traffic back to my blog.

Newsletter – This is where I interact with people that know me and trust me enough with access to their inbox.  This is often people I know, and have met.  So my newsletter subscribers are far more likely to be friends that I love.  So I share my best content with my newsletter audience.  I give them first access to any new tools or tricks I come across, and try to be as helpful as possible to them.

Now it’s worth noting how your social media strategy would change if you didn’t use each of these channels.  For example, let’s say you only have a blog, and you are trying to use that blog to generate sales.  You can see how your job is going to be more difficult because your main audience at your blog will be strangers, and it’s typically more difficult to see to strangers than it is people that know you and value your work.

Blog – I don’t know you. (Content – Here’s who I am)

Social – I know of you. (Content – How can I help you?)

Newsletter – I know you and I like you.  (Content – This will help you, my friend)

Also, if you are trying to generate sales, those sales would likely come from Social and your Newsletter.  But at the same time, these are the audiences that know you and that you know.  So you don’t want to sell too much to your friends, right?  Instead, you give them your best and most helpful content, and make sure they are AWARE of how they can help you.  Friends don’t just sell to friends, right?

At least that’s how I do it.  How do you balance your content for different audiences?

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Long-Form Content or Short Posts; Which Is More Important?

3347658610_bd6daf9b57_zFor years, there’s been a raging debate among both personal and business bloggers over what’s the ideal length for posts.  In general, most bloggers settle in on a post length of a few hundred words, but there are definitely exceptions to the rule.

There’s actually a lot of research that shows that the longer your blog post is, the more social shares, on average, it will get.  In fact, some studies suggest that blog posts can be up to 10,000 words (you read that right) in order to maximize social shares.  The logic is actually sound, as any post with over 2,000 words is likely going to be a deep-dive into a particular topic, and those posts tend to create more value, and as a result, they attract more of those coveted social shares.  I’ve seen this with my own content, as my most shared posts tend to be between 1,500 and 2,000 words.

Here’s the problem: The amount of time it takes to create a post with 1,500 or more words is much more than it does for a shorter post of 500 words or less.  In fact, for the two posts I just linked to (Both of which have between 500 and 1,000 social shares), it took approximately 20 hours total to write both posts.  Think about that for a minute: If you knew that it would take you 10 hours to write a post, how many posts could you write in a month?  1?  2?  None?

So if you commit to writing only long-form content, or posts over 1,500 words, you are also committing to creating far fewer posts.  This creates another problem: It’s harder to build readership if you publish only a few times a month.  Which means your 1 or 2 longer posts you publish a month are going to be seen by fewer people, which means they will gather fewer social shares.

Given all this, it seems there IS a role for shorter content, despite what the ‘experts’ will claim.  The bottom line is that while creating good content is important, creating MORE content is as well.  There needs to be a compromise between quality of content, and quantity.  Both are pivotal for building a readership.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a hybrid approach.  I’ve been writing shorter posts, sometimes as short as 200 words, sprinkling in 1 or so longer posts of 1,000 words or more a week.  This strategy has allowed me to significantly increase the number of posts I write here, and has resulted in a sharp increase in Social as well as Referral traffic.  This makes sense, because increasingly, traffic from Social is coming from social shares, and those visitors are likely to either know you already, or engage you on Twitter or Facebook AFTER sharing your post.  And as I talked about in the last post, it creates a nice way for your blog content to help you get noticed by others, then you can expand on that relationship via your newsletter, or during those social interactions that come after the sharing.

So if you’ve been on the fence about how long your posts should be, consider letting yourself off the hook and writing shorter posts.  Shorter posts still can be quite valuable for your readers, and creating more content also helps you build readership.  And more readers means when you do write that longer post, it will be seen (and shared!) by more people.

Pic via Flickr user 10Ch

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Building Your Blog For 2016

23409777699_7332a88c97_zEvery year I use the month of December to do a bit of an audit of how my blogging year went, and then plan out how I want to leverage the blog in the coming year.  I pick December since it’s the last month of the year, plus traffic is typically down the first 2 weeks of the year anyway as we all get knee-deep into Holiday shopping and planning.  So it’s the perfect time to take a step back and examine where you’ve been and re-assess where you are going.

When you’re planning for the coming year, it’s best to start with this question: Who is our desired blogging audience?  In other words, what type of person do you want to read your blog?  For your business blog, you’ll have answers like:

  • We want readers who are current or potential customers
  • We want readers who are current or potential donors or partners
  • We want readers who are current or potential clients

This is a good start, but the more specific your answers, the better your results.  And it’s a process, you want to drill down with your answer because the more specific your focus, the more efficient your content creation efforts.  Here’s how I would drill down if I were deciding exactly who I wanted to reach with my blog in 2016:

Q – Who is your desired audience?

A – Potential clients.

Q – Potential clients for what service(s)?

A – Potential clients for my speaking and consulting services, as well as companies looking for sponsorship opportunities.

Q – Which area; speaking, consulting or sponsorships is most important to you?

A – Hmmmm…probably speaking first, consulting close behind, then sponsorships.

Q – So it looks like potential clients for speaking and consulting are where you want to devote most of your energy.  Will you be focused on speaking on the same areas where you would like to consult?

A – For the most part, yes.  I want to speak on topics related to brand advocacy, customer engagement, and helping companies create more customer-centric content and marketing.  These are also the same areas where I want to focus my consulting.

 

Notice how just by asking a couple of more specific questions that I’m already narrowing down my focus a bit.  At first I was just thinking about wanting readers who are potential clients, now I know I need to focus more on potential clients who need speakers and consulting services, moreso than sponsorship opportunities.  Additionally, I know that I typically will be speaking on the same topics that I want to consult on, so there’s a lot of overlapping there.  This is already helping me better define my blogging focus in 2016.

A Hypothetical Example of How This Could Work For Your Company

Let’s do this exercise for you.  Let’s say you blog for a company that sells website security services.  You charge customers a monthly fee to manage their basic website security.  You’ve noticed that customers will typically contact you when they have an existing issue with their website (it’s been hacked, there’s a malware issue, etc), and they will continue to buy your services for 2-3 months after the problem has been solved, then they will typically stop buying and won’t contact you again until there’s another issue that they need help with.  So there seems to be a lot of churn starting at the 3-4 month mark, so one of the focus points for the entire company is trying to reduce that churn rate and increase the time that customers stay on.  Let’s go through the same Q&A process for this example company:

Q – Who is your desired audience?

A – Current and potential customers.

Q – Which one is more important to you in 2016?

A – Well we need both, but a business focus in 2016 will be ensuring that current customers stay with us for a longer period of time.

Q – What would typically be reasons why customers would leave?

A – Typically, companies will contact us when they’ve encountered a security issue with their website that requires immediate attention.  They will sign up for our service and then after we’ve fixed the issue, they will typically stay with us for a few months and if the issue doesn’t flare up again, often they will discontinue the service and only come back if something else happens in the future.

 

With just 3 questions, we now have a much clearer sense of the direction of our content in 2016.  We know we need to focus more on connecting with current customers and giving them a reason to stay with us longer.  This helps drive our content strategy for 2016, and gives us an idea of the types of content we need to create, such as:

  • Blog posts that talk about how customers do more business with companies that have a secure website.
  • Blog posts that talk about the potential damage to a brand’s reputation if their website is repeatedly down due to poor website security.

Blog posts such as this help make the case to current customers that it’s better for their business to stay with your company and let them continue to handle their website security.  By taking a few minutes to think through your content goals for 2016, it not only helps you better connect with your exact target audience, but it means you will spend less time on your content and that it will be more efficient.

Pic via Flickr user Giuseppe Milo

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For September

For every month in 2015, I’ve set specific goals for growing my blog readership, and podcast audience.  The end goal is that by December this blog will have at least 100,000 visitors for that month, and the podcast will be downloaded at least 10,000 times for December.  Every month I am going to write a post like this recapping how I did in the previous month, and share any lessons I have learned.  The goal is to help you learn how to build a blog readership and podcast audience as I do.

First, here were my goals for September:

Blog – At least 85,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 5,000 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For September

My blog’s traffic in September was 35,862 versus 36,154 in August, a decrease of less than 1%.  I got way behind on both the blog and podcast in September, only writing 3 posts in September.

I made a couple of changes last month to my blog that I think has at least improved my issue with falling search traffic.  The first is I went into my robots.txt file and made sure it including the path to my sitemap.  As soon as I made this update, I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that Google immediately started indexing an additional 200 pages from my site.  Also, I noticed a slight uptick in search traffic from that point forward.  Not huge, but definitely noticeable.  So much so that I believe search traffic will actually go up for October vs September.  So this might be something for you to explore, I had manually submitted my sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools before, and that didn’t seem to register, but adding the sitemap URL into my robots.txt file seemed to do the trick.

Here’s how traffic broke down by channels in September vs August:

Organic Search – Down 2%

Direct – Up 11.65%

Referral – Down 7.71%

Social – Down 14.93%

Other – Down 12.33%

Email – Down 81.43%

Referral, Social and Email being down is directly related to writing fewer posts in September, as I only wrote 3 posts for the month.  I got too caught up with client work and didn’t devote enough time to regular posting and it bit me.  Case in point, I published more posts this week than I did all of last month.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for September

The goal for September was at least 5,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show had 3,924 downloads in September. The drop was due to only having 1 new episode in September, and that didn’t publish until the last day of the month.  Given that, the number of downloads is actually pretty remarkable.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastDLJan-Sept

Strong growth throughout the year but it did start to tail off the last couple of weeks of September due to no new episodes going up.  On Wednesday I published the first episode of #FanDamnShow for this month and daily downloads had continued to fall this month up till that point.  A good reminder for me to make the time to create regular content for both my blog and podcast in order to build or even sustain an audience.

Here’s the blog audience and podcast download goals for October:

Blog Traffic – At least 90,000 visitors

Podcast Downloads – At least 6,500 downloads

This are the goals I set at the start of the year.  I’ll check back in next month and let you know how I did!

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5 Ways I Use Google Analytics to Improve My Blog’s Content

First, if you haven’t added Google Analytics to your blog, do so now.  It doesn’t matter if your blog is your business or nothing more than your online diary, you need to know more about the people that visit your blog.  GA is a great way to give you those insights, and it’s free.  Here’s 5 ways I use Google Analytics every day to better understand the traffic that visits my blog and to make my content strategy more effective:

1 – I compare today’s hourly traffic vs last week’s hourly traffic for the same day.  For example, on Sunday, I will bring up the traffic for the current day, set it to hourly, and compare it to the previous Sunday’s hourly traffic.  This lets me know as the day progresses how the hourly traffic levels are comparing to the previous Sunday.  Here’s what it looked like for this Sunday (blue) vs the previous Sunday (orange):

Week2WeekTrafficGA This gives me a quick and easy snapshot of how traffic did on this Sunday vs the previous Sunday.  As you can see, a very good day, hourly traffic was up almost every hour versus the previous Sunday and traffic for the day was up almost 15% and Avg Session Duration was up over 40%, another huge number.

Here’s how you can get this same view for your blog:  Click on Audience, then Overview, both on the left side of the screen.  The default view is to just show you the previous 30 days before this one.  You want to change that view so click on the Down button next to the date range on the top right of the screen.  This will open up a calendar showing you this month plus the previous two months.  Under Date Range, the previous 30 days will be highlighted.  You want to first click on TODAY’s date.  Next, click on the small box right under it that says ‘Compare to:’, and it will have a dropdown menu that you don’t want to touch for now.  Two new date range boxes will open up under the first two, but they won’t be highlighted.  You want to click on the first date box on the left, and then go back to the calendar and click the date for one week earlier.  For example, if you are doing this on a Monday, for this you would click on the previous Monday’s date.  Click on it again so that the date range you are comparing to is the previous Monday.  Then click Apply.

At first, it will be set to the default view, which is Day.  It will show you how the current day’s traffic is doing versus 7 days earlier.  If you click on Hourly, you will then see today’s traffic broken down by hours and compared to the previous Monday’s traffic on an hourly basis.  The blue dots will be for today, the orange dots will be for the previous Monday.  So you can quickly see how hourly traffic is doing today vs the same day last week.  Here’s what the settings look like for the report I created on Monday to compare traffic to the previous Monday:

WeeklyGA

It can be a bit complicated at first, but pretty easy once you get the hang of it.  As you can see, you can easily adjust the settings to compare this week to the previous week or this month to the previous month, or this year to 3 years ago.  Whatever you want.

2 – I closely examine Real Time traffic, especially right after I publish a new post.  The Real Time traffic feature in GA is a great way to get an instant snapshot of the traffic that’s currently on your blog.  For example, as soon as I publish this post, I will share it on Twitter and Facebook, probably LinkedIn as well.  I will then check with Real Time traffic, to see which, if any, of those links are immediately sending traffic to the site.  This is great way to see instantly if certain types of content resonate more or less on a particular site.  For example, if the link to this post I share on LinkedIn immediately sends traffic and the link I share on Facebook doesn’t, that could suggest that the topic of using Google Analytics is more relevant to the more business-oriented audience on LinkedIn.  Plus, examining Real Time traffic can be a great way to get early notification of a new backlink to your blog or maybe an influencer with a large network Twitter just RTed your post.  Here’s an example of what this looks like:

RealTimeGA

You can see which content is being viewed, from what sources, their location, etc.  Also, if you get in the habit of regularly checking this you will get a sense of what times of the day are better for your traffic, which also helps you decide when to publish new posts!

3 – I examine traffic by channel.  For this I go back to the week to week comparison.  Click on Acquisition, then All Traffic, then Channels.  This shows me a breakdown of my traffic by different channel types, such as Organic Search, Direct, Referral and Social.  This is very important because if you just look at your overall traffic numbers you won’t get a complete picture.  For example, let’s say this Monday’s traffic to your blog was 500 visitors, and last Monday’s traffic was 450.  So that’s a weekly gain of about 10%, which is really good.  But without looking at the traffic by channel, you may assume that each type of traffic rose by 10%, but it could be that your Organic Search traffic was up by 40% and your Direct traffic was down by 25%.  But overall traffic was up.  Still, those are big jumps in both directions for your Organic Search and Direct traffic, so it’s worth knowing that so you can keep an eye on both moving forward.

4 – I dive deeper into channel traffic and sort by Source/Medium.  This is very important because all sources of traffic are not created equally.  For example, I am writing this post at about 6PM on a Monday night.  In comparing today’s traffic vs the previous Monday’s traffic, here’s what I currently see in Channel view for Organic Search:

Organic Search

There’s about 6 hours in the day so Organic Search for today will end up being close to 1,100 visitors for the day, which will be about a 10% increase over the previous Monday, so I’m pleased with that.  But, it’s worth remembering that Organic Search isn’t just Google, it’s all Organic Search from ALL search engines.  To find out exactly how each search engine is doing vs the previous Monday, we need to click Source/Medium heading above these results.  So while overall Organic Search is currently down 14.66%, here’s how each search engine is actually doing:

Google – Down 11.9%

Yahoo – Down 5.56%

Bing – Down 58.56%

So you can see that Google and Yahoo are actually doing way better than Bing is.  Now about 90% of the Organic Search is coming from Google for me, but your numbers may vary.  If the majority of your blog’s Organic Search was coming from Bing, it would be worrisome to see your traffic from Bing down by 58%!

5 – I look at the most viewed pages week to week.  For this view I click on Behavior then Site Content then All Pages on the left side of the GA dashboard.  I do this because I want to see what content is driving visitors, but I also am looking for irregularities.  Did one page get a lot of views this week and none last week, or vice versa?  For example, when I click on All Pages it shows me the most viewed pages for today vs last Monday.  Notice something interesting I found:

MostViewedPosts

See that post on the bottom, Ford Launches the Fiesta Movement?  That’s an old post, but notice it had zero views last Monday, but has 18 this Monday!  I would like to know if GA can help me understand why this old post suddenly got a lot of views this Monday, when it usually gets none.  Does anyone know of a way to further way to drill down with Google Analytics and figure that out?

 

Those are the 5 main ways I use Google Analytics to get a better idea of the makeup of my blog traffic.  What’s your favorite way to use GA?