THATBlog

What are the first questions marketing teams hear from management or the C-suite? How much is this costing us - and how much are we making from it? This is true whether you’re talking about TV and print ads or social media and content marketing. How do you measure blog success? Here are five key metrics that empower you to do so, and in the process, helping you refine your strategy - and satisfy the bosses!

1. Lead Generation

Creating high-quality content is job one when it comes to blogs, and learning how to promote it correctly is equally as important. Where the rubber starts to really meet the road, so to speak, is when you begin seeing a bump in leads.

According to research, brands with blogs generate 67 percent more leads than competitors who do not offer this resource. Track these, and use attribution modeling to see how effectively your blog drives goals like traffic and conversions.

How do you turn your blog into a lead-generating machine? Post regularly. If you can’t commit to two to three times a week, at least deliver fresh content once weekly. To make it easier, you can craft months’ worth of content and schedule publication. Use your blog to answer common questions, ask your own questions (this is great for feedback), address key concerns, offer solutions, and engage with your audience by catering to their needs.

2. Social Media Shares

Blogging and social media are like peanut butter and jelly, ice cream and chocolate syrup, peas and carrots (for the healthier folks!). They’re a match made in content marketing heaven. When you add a new piece, link to it via your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn (etc.) pages. You can also link to evergreen content that is relevant to your customers/clients today.

Track how many shares your content sees. Track how many likes, favorites, and other responses. You can also use analytics tools to figure out the best times and days to post content and which pieces get the most traction.

Shares don’t equal sales, but they’re a great head start in that direction.

3. Links

Links are a powerful way to measure blog success; search engines crawl through content and assign value based on the links to your site. A link from a spammy site reflects poorly, obviously. But a link from a high-value site (think New York Times or a respected local business) essentially rubs off on your brand.

To generate more backlinks, make sure that your content is compelling and offers value to your audience. At the end of the piece, you want them to say, “I learned something; I’m going to take the next step.” Other sites want to connect their customers/visitors to relevant information (it impacts their credibility too).

Another option is to find sites that connect to your business and offer to do a guest post, asking only for a link in return. This will also broaden your audience and help you reach more people.

4. Engagements

By engagements we mean comments or connections. Expect a healthy mix of positive and not-so-positive comments; you can’t please everyone, and there’s always the stray troll around! But do take constructive criticism seriously and respond respectfully. Track not only how many people click through to a piece, but how many actively interact with you, and their peers, on it.

5. Visits

One of the easiest ways to measure blog success is to watch the flow of traffic. When you’re seeing an upswing in visits, take a look at what’s working and grow from there. If you’re seeing a decline in traffic and engagement, examine your content and figure out what’s missing. Do your topics miss the mark? Is the information vague? Is it just not interesting or compelling? This is your chance to course correct.

Blogging can be a potent business tool. As they say, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Use these blog performance metrics to track your success.