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Define Your Own Blogging Success

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The headlines scream new (and often contradictory) dictates in black and white, every morning.

“Blogging is dead.”

“Content is King.”

“Video is a must-have.”

“Orange is the new black.”

Wait, that last one is just a Netflix show. I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention.

You must define your own version of success for the marketing tools you’re using.

If blogging is your chosen tool, there are many possible versions of success:

  • A creative outlet
  • Leads for your business
  • Search engine rank/traffic
  • A portfolio or resume of published work
  • Thought leadership or credibiilty in a niche
  • Platform for book authorship
  • Information & tips for your customers

The only way you fail is if you end up just going through the motions without a purpose.

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” Yogi Berra

 

Monetized Blog vs Non-Monetized Blog

The first big dividing line would be, do you want to make money directly from your blog?

Direct monetization routes would include a paywall in order to read the posts, or the selling of sponsorships. In both of these cases, you need to be pretty established up-front in order to succeed. No-one is going to pay to read your posts unless they already know how fantastic you are. Teaser content might be effective in this case.

By the same token, you won’t be able to sell sponsorships until you’ve proven a large readership or a very definable audience. Sponsors will want to know your page views and number of subscribers, something that’s not generally very impressive when you’re first starting out.

If you know that you want to run ads in the future, but don’t have enough traffic to be enticing to advertisers, set reader expectations. Consider reserving a footer banner or sidebar square that you will use for future advertising, and use it to promote something of your own (or for a friend). If you make it look professional, you will be subtly letting readers know that your blog will contain advertising. Much better than launching with no ads, and then stuffing them in all of a sudden, months later.

Indirect Blog Monetization

If you want to derive value from your blog, but not direct monetary value, consider the following:

  • Include a call to action with every post
  • Be minimalist with your sidebar information; don’t distract from the primary CTA
  • Be sure to collect email information, to start building your own marketing asset for the future
  • Make it very clear what the purpose of the blog is…if you’re all about thought leadership, consider a photo image of the primary author (perhaps a photo taken at a speaking engagement). Remember social proof too. A quote from a peer or colleague might be appropriate on the page.
  • If your blog is supporting an SEO strategy, don’t be “that guy” who stuffs keywords without meaning. Google doesn’t like that anyway. Focus more on creating in-depth, valuable articles on a regular basis. If your blogging platform includes SEO tools, use them!

Tracking Success

All of the effort you’re putting into your blogging will be for nothing if you don’t have any way to measure progress.

Once you’ve determined what blogging success looks like, you must come up with a way to track whether it’s fulfilling the purpose.

Here are some examples of things you can track:

  • For a “thought leadership” blog – track social mentions of your name or brand, or links back to your blog from other authority sites
  • For a business blog – track leads or emails captured
  • For SEO – track your rank for specific search terms
  • For a customer-focused blog – track any decrease in support requests, or if you’re using customer satisfaction scoring (like Net Promoter Score), see if that is affected over time

Don’t forget to baseline your metric before you start, so that you can see progress as it happens.

The metrics shouldn’t be set in stone, either. Establish a quarterly routine of looking at the numbers, reviewing your blog, and making tweaks as necessary.

Your blog is only one tool in your marketing arsenal, but it should be part of your marketing metrics in order to be effective.

How have you defined blogging success for yourself?

 

Featured image via Flickr Creative Commons: Paxson Woelber

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Successful businesses use Google Analytics to super-charge their marketing

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Google Analytics is the Ferrari of analytics platforms. It’s fast, sexy, and can super-charge your marketing.

However, most entrepreneurs and small business owners are just sitting in the car, afraid to leave first gear.

A recently released white paper from Formstack pulls together some interesting stats about how marketers are really using (or not using) Google Analytics. One that stood out to me is that only 33% of marketers track ROI via Google Analytics. Perhaps that’s because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of tracking only the surface, vanity metrics.

Want to know how many unique visitors we got last week? Sure!
Want to know which page on our website leads to the most conversions? Uh…hang on a second…

If you actually have goals set up in your Google Analytics account, congratulations, you’re in the 40% minority!

It’s time to dive deeper into those numbers and turn them into useful, actionable information.

The infographic below offers a path to improve your use of Google Analytics. One crucial step is knowing how to A/B test your landing pages and take advantage of tools like Google’s Content Experiments to see what’s working.

Try testing different versions of your headline, main content, design, call to action, and forms (like your sign up, subscribe, or purchase forms). Sometimes a small shift can make all the difference when it comes to conversions.

Are you using the free tools at your disposal to step up your marketing?

infographic - landing page ROI
Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Is Your Business Focused on Big Data?

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abigdata

The amount of data that is created and owned by businesses has increased dramatically over the past few years, and this has made data management a more challenging task for many companies.

However, there are new technologies available to enable businesses to get the most out of their data, one of which is big data.

Here is a look at how adopting a big data solution can be beneficial to your business:

Overview of Big Data Management

Big data management refers to the act of organizing, administrating and governing large quantities of data, both structured and unstructured.

It aims to improve the quality and accessibility of data, so that it can be used for big data analytics and business intelligence.

With an effective big data management strategy, businesses can locate valuable data in large pools of semi-structured and unstructured data from a wide range of sources, including system logs, call detail records and social media websites.

Benefits of Implementing a Big Data System

Better Customer Service

To get the most out of your big data system, you need to stay focused on the big data bottom line.

A big data solution can help drive up sales by facilitating better customer service. With such a system in place, your employees will be able to perform real-time checks on your customers and provide helpful advice on products and services.

Additionally, big data can unite the physical and digital shopping spheres by allowing you and your employees to provide useful information about your physical stores through the Internet.

Enhance Product Development and Marketing

Another benefit of big data is that it enables you to gain a better understanding of your target consumers’ behavior and perception of your brand and products, and segment them according to demographic groups and geographical locations.

With such information, you will be able to develop products and services that can meet their needs more effectively, as well as fine-tune your marketing campaign to achieve better results.

Improve Decision Making

By implementing a big data solution, you will have easy access to accurate information on almost every area of your business, ranging from operations to product inventory. This enables you to identify problems and make well-informed decisions to improve various aspects of your business.

Big data also makes information more easily available to your employees, which can help them perform their duties more competently.

Big Data Trends in 2014

New solutions are constantly being developed to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and security of big data systems. As such, you can expect to see significant changes in big data trends in 2014.

According to expert predictions, these changes may include the transitioning of big data from hype to actionable intelligence, increasing use of data by traditional companies to generate revenue, growing importance of visualization tools as an IT expenditure and greater implementation of predictive analytics and machine learning.

In order to get maximum value from your big data solution, you need to make sure that you have the right combination of big data analytics tools, processes and people.

Photo credit: Forbes.com

About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from Cloud computing to social media marketing.

Managing to Expectations: A Primer

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By Dipti Parmar

The best advice I received during my career in corporate America can be summed up in these four words; inspect what you expect. These four words that can provide focus for managing a business, a staff, a team, and even your children.

When it comes to business, the only metrics you should concern yourself with gathering are those that will help you make the right decisions. Most analytical software tends to emphasize metrics that might make you feel good about your business but do not really provide any useful guidance for making decisions.

For example, a report that reveals you have a total of 20,000 “hits” to your website may make you feel good, but the report tells you absolutely nothing about how you achieved those hits. In this sense, such statistics aren’t terribly useful.

You may have seen this in your business. You launch a new feature or product and a few days later sales and revenue are up. Everyone pats themselves on the back. The product guys think it is the result of the feature, the sales guy thinks it’s the new promotion and the customer service people think it’s the customer-friendly policies. The fact is, you don’t really know what caused the up-tick, but when sales and revenues drop back to baseline … no one wants to accept the blame!

Compare this to what I would describe as an actionable metric. For example, by adding a new feature to your website but allowing only every other customer to see it, you would be able to examine both sets of revenue streams a week later and make some meaningful conclusions. This metric is designed to allow you to ascertain the effectiveness of the new feature based on revenue differences. If the new feature increased sales, then you obviously want to implement that feature for all your customers. If you see that it didn’t move the needle for either group, you could scrap it. The important take-away here is that these types of metrics are actionable. It is data from which a conclusion can be readily made and acted upon.

How to Achieve Actionable Metrics:

Split tests—such as the one I described above, will allow you to take the right course of action on anything from minor copy tweaks to major product changes. These tests are widely known as A/B tests and you can get more information and background from this whitepaper titled “Controlled Experiments on the Web: Survey and Practical Guide” (PDF).

Per Customer Metrics—because people are metrics! Ordinary metrics can fog our focus on reality by diverting attention to unreal groups and pseudo concepts. It is significantly advantageous to examine data from a per customer or per segment perspective. Try focusing, for example, on the number of page views per new or repeat customer rather than just the total number of page views. Per customer data can indicate that you are increasing the level of engagement with your customer. Looking at aggregate data will not reveal this trend. There are several analytical packages that offer a business the ability to reduce aggregate data to per customer and/or per segment analyses. One is Google Analytics, which in combination with Google’s goal tracking feature will allow you to see which web referrers are driving the most conversions. Armed with this information, you can make decisions on which referrers are worth your time and money. This allows your business to maximize its return on investment.

Group analysis and funnel metrics—can be among the most useful metrics for forward decision making. For purposes of illustration, let’s say you have an e-commerce product with a few life-cycle events. These may include registering for the product, signing up for a free trial, using the product and, ultimately, buying the product. A simple report can be created to show these metrics for groups in a defined time period. For example, you might create a weekly report which shows what percentage of customers registering in that week went on to take each life-cycle step. If these numbers reflect no changes from group to group, then we have learned that nothing significant is happening. If one spikes up or tumbles down, then we have an unmistakable reason to investigate. Using funnel metrics to consolidate this data into a few useful numbers is easy to do manually, even if you have a large number of registrants. Simply break out the old fashioned index cards and record the number of customers registering each day. Then for each conversion (sale), make a tally mark on the index card corresponding to the date that customer registered (not the date they bought). Then on a weekly or monthly basis, you can compute conversion rates for the customers registering in that time period. Obviously, it is this number you want to focus on driving up!

What I have shared here today has been focused on the e-commerce business but the theme of managing to expectations is equally applicable to brick and mortar businesses. The idea of inspecting what you expect is applicable to all business enterprises, from invoice financing companies like CBAC Funding to the mom and pop dry cleaning store in your neighborhood.

If you expect to achieve a goal, measuring your progress is essential; otherwise, how will you know you reached it?

Author’s Bio: Dipti Parmar, a digital marketing wiz is associated with E2M Solutions. She’s been journeying through the world of digital marketing for 6 years and is a blogger and networker. She’s also a movie buff and loves taking long walks by the seashore. She is @dipTparmar on Twitter.

5 Reasons Why Social Media Managers Shouldn’t Live Without Analytics

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By Marcela De Vivo

An adept social media manager knows that no social platform or social signal is truly insignificant, which is why we often create multiple accounts on every platform that exists, or has the potential to become the “next big thing.” Currently sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ dominate the market, but collating data from these four sites alone can be a full-time job.

Every campaign has its own methods of tracking and analyzing data, but ultimately every social media manager longs for a tool that will not only allow you to aggregate various metrics in a convenient way, but also gives you the data you need to discern what is your most engaging content, how it applies to your target audience, and how it calls them to act.

Long no more–that tool does exist, in the form of social media analytics dashboards. Analytics dashboards are designed to organize information in an easy-to-access and comprehensible presentation. You can gain all the valuable statistics from every social media network, all in one place, along with the data that can help you measure the quality and effectiveness of your campaign, thereby increasing your overall productivity on social media.

With a number of widgets and add-ons, dashboards allow you to gain specific information without having to visit an endless amount of sites to access them. Managing your social media output requires a lot of legwork but dashboards will decrease the amount of time finding the data and giving you the time to work with it.

If you are a social media manager and you do not have a social media dashboard, this will revolutionize the way you do your work for five valuable and empowering reasons:

1. Time Management

It’s vital for a business or website to keep their finger on the pulse of social media, but this often requires having multiple campaigns running on multiple networks, which can be incredibly time consuming. Though the small actions of logging in, tracking activity, switching back and forth to compare metrics, and engaging with customers might only take a few minutes or even seconds each, those actions quickly rack up.

A social media dashboard like Google Analytics or Cyfe can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend because you have access to each network, and each network’s data. This gives you quick and simple answers to questions such as “what’s working” and “when were we the most effective?”

Besides having access to a variety of networks such as Facebook and Pinterest, you can also create multiple dashboards to control each campaign or client separately, if need be. And when it’s time to present reports to clients or to your manager, outputting the data is as simple as a quick export.

2. Visual Comparisons

With a dashboard, the easy aggregation allows you to see all of the statistics regarding a campaign, which can be displayed in a variety of graphs and charts (another great feature for reporting).

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Image Courtesy of koozai.com

Along with the stunning amount of graphs, dashboards like Cyfe gives you the ability to track what works with customers such as the number of conversions, likes, re-tweets, etc. Another time saving tool for social media managers is that most of the brand management data on social media dashboards can not only be exported but also be transferred to a hard copy at the end of a time period

Dashboards simply give you the opportunity to monitor your reputation around the clock worldwide. Kristi Hines’ piece on Cyfe, Get your Business Analytics Fix in One Dashboard, goes in depth about the usefulness of dashboards and widgets in regards to your business (definitely worth checking out).

3. Collaboration

An essential feature of social media dashboards is the ease of sharing; this hands you the ability to collaborate with others in your company. Most dashboards empower you with a feature to share the information no matter what the distance is.

This not only makes it easy to work together with someone on a campaign but increases the effectiveness by giving them the opportunity to see all of the valuable aggregated data. Instead of spending time over the phone or e-mailing, your co-worker can simply just access the dashboard and have all of the data right in front of them.

4. Tracking Your Competitors

A very important quality to social media dashboards is the ability to track your competitors’ data. It’s time consuming enough tracking your own data, so why spend your valuable time tracking theirs? With a dashboard, however, you can monitor widgets that can show you their statistics on social media platforms just the same as yours, and that are just as easy to view and compare.

You can also install widgets to view their SEO data like their MozStats and view their Alexa rating. This gives you the information you need to compare where they stand in regard to your campaign without setting you back in terms of time and resources.

5. Not just for Social Sites

Managing social media doesn’t just stop at Twitter and Facebook. It is important to have access to all of the benefits that the internet has for business.

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Image Courtesy of iacquire.com

Widgets that track your Google Adwords data along with AB testing give you the opportunity to see how customers engage with your business and allow you to track what is most appealing for them. Finance information from Paypal and Salesforce are all available, so you have access to invoices and balances from a variety of sources.

Stop wishing about a quick and easy social analytics dashboard and set yours up this week. Searching will help you find a myriad of tools to get you started.

How are you tracking your company’s data?

Marcela De Vivo is the CEO of Gryffin Media, an online marketing agency specializing in helping companies integrate their social media, paid, and content marketing efforts. She loves to research different ways of growing online, and sharing her knowledge. In her spare time, she’s a yoga and meditation junkie. Follow her on Facebook.

How Will Google’s Hummingbird Update Affect Small Businesses?

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By Michelle Rebecca

When Google issued its most recent update (named Hummingbird) to the company’s 15-year-old search algorithm, it raised a number of concerns for small business owners. The update has two primary objectives: using so-called conversational searches to find results, as opposed to the traditional keywords, and displaying search content on the far right side of search pages.

Many small businesses rely on search engine optimization to gain the notice of potential customers. As with any algorithm update, this one will impact SEO in a big way. Here’s what small businesses can expect, and what measures they can implement to ensure that their rankings don’t take a hit.

Google's hummingbird algorithm change

Think Like Your Customer

The Hummingbird shift to conversational searches is based in part on the impact that mobile phones are having on search. These days people can vocally ask their tablet or smartphone a question, like “where’s the best Chinese restaurant within 5 miles of here,” instead of simply searching “Chinese restaurant” with the keypad. Google’s goal has always been to think like its users, therefore bringing back the most relevant and helpful results. And so it’s changing its search to anticipate questions.

Small businesses must do the same thing. Any SEO company should now advise their clients it’s time to rethink search. You must expand beyond keywords and instead think about conversational search terms that could lead people to your site. Try to anticipate what sort of phrases people might use to search out your wares. For example, if you provide plumbing services, a good place to start would be “where can I find the best plumber?”

More Focused Results

In the past small businesses were often fighting with bigger ones, with bigger budgets, over choice keywords. But with the greater focus on phrases, which tend to be more precise, small businesses will gain an edge. Geo-targeting, or targeting by location, becomes increasingly important with these Hummingbird updates.

Small businesses should increasingly focus on searches confined to a specific area, where they stand to benefit most, rather than broader search terms. Hummingbird will take the location of a search into account whenever possible, and a small business with a very narrow focus is more likely to come up in results than a big one with locations across the country.

Dealing with the Drawbacks

Of course, for every up there is a down, and the down for small business owners is the other Hummingbird adjustment, which is designed to give users answers to their questions without ever leaving the Google page. Displaying search content on the search pages means in essence that Google will try to anticipate the information people are searching and highlight the answer in special boxes on the right-side column that offer small glimpses into web pages without making the searcher click on the result.

For example, if you’re looking for the date that the song “My Girl” was released, Google might display a few lines from the “My Girl” Wikipedia entry that answer the question on the right side of the search results page, eliminating the need for further searching.

The end result is less web traffic for your business’s web site. The dilemma is how to get people to click to your site anyway. Small business owners will need to come up with some innovative answers. One is to offer something of value on the site that can’t be “scraped” onto the right side by the Google bots, such as a coupon or voucher for a free sample. You might try offering contests on your site that you can advertise on the homepage but require clicking on the site to actually enter. The smartest businesses will play around with different approaches to see what delivers the most traffic, at least until Google offers another update.

Will you be making any changes to your SEO strategy because of the Hummingbird update?

Author’s Bio: Michelle is a freelancer who currently works for a top SEO company. She has a passion for the Internet, specifically social media and blogging. She loves how social media connects people across the globe, and appreciates that blogging gives her the opportunity to voice her thoughts and share advice with an unlimited audience. Follow her on Google+.