Concentrate On Shares To Boost Your Authority

Will the next blog you’re working on produce value for your business? How will you measure it? This week, we discuss measuring three impactful metrics to reliability build authority. Below you’ll learn these three metrics, how we measure them at ChipBot, and which ones we avoid in our marketing reports.

Transcript Below

Matt Mroczek: Whether you’re writing the blog yourself or you’re hiring somebody else to do it. In terms of trying to figure out if it’s working or not, what metrics do you look at?

Matt Lo: Three key metrics.

You’re looking at total shares on social media, comments within the blog, and you’re looking specifically at direct messages or e-mails that are going you or your marketer.

Matt Mroczek: Do any of those outweigh each other or are all equal?

Matt Lo: They’re all equal because every other metric doesn’t matter and this isn’t my original idea, this idea came from Content Machine.

We’ve been following it at ChipBot, for about six months and it’s been the key indicator to know whether you’re telling a great story, you’re delivering value and you have an actionable piece to it.

With those metrics being said…

Why do you think business owners look so heavily at unique page visits and bounce rates when it comes to measuring the success of their blog content?

Matt Mroczek: Because that is what I can judge off on conversions.

If I see so many people do or do not go to the home page or the product page. It’s easy for then me to say, ‘oh this one didn’t drive sales.’

And the problem with that is blog content isn’t necessarily supposed to drive sales. It’s a top of the funnel type of marketing activity to give awareness to the problem you’re solving and that’s why the engagement is really what you’re looking for.

It’s, ‘does anybody relate to the problem that we’re solving and talking about?’

So in my Google Analytics, because you already said engagement is key.

Should I even look at my Google Analytics when trying to evaluate the success of my blog?

Matt Lo: It’s only going to really impact two things. The very early part of your indicators meaning, if you’re not getting page views at all, then you need to be focusing on traffic acquisition.

Where you’re targeting a right audience and they’re going to your site through backlinks or through content sharing.

Then Google Analytics comes at the end of the funnel where you get to see,  are people hitting the blog for the second, third, fourth time and then converting.

You are going use Google Analytics Goals for that. Everything in between doesn’t matter. Because you’re looking at social media metrics for that. You’re looking at your internal communication tools for that when it comes to DM’s and emails.

And you’re looking at overall referral velocity based on the traffic because you want to where the most traffic is coming from; either Twitter, Facebook, Quora, etc.

Matt Mroczek: What would you rather have a post that gets a lot of likes and shares on social, but not a lot of click-throughs or not a lot of page views. Or one that doesn’t get a lot of shares, but does get a lot of engagement on the post itself?

Matt Lo: If it has a lot of shares, it’s going to lead to more clicks. So I want more shares. I really don’t care about likes, because for likes — Most algorithms only show content that someone has liked periodically to new users, and you need to get the most likes for the day. And that’s why you want to focus on shares.

Because if someone retweets or shares content, that will show up in a new user’s feed, whether or not you have a lot of shares. So focusing on shares gives you a direct insight of ‘is someone moved so much by your content that they are willing to go out of their way to hit the share button and share your content with their followers.’

Matt Mroczek: How important are headlines when writing content? Because if 59% of people are willing to share content to their following without reading the article – How does that play into your content creation mindset?

Matt Lo: It’s usually at the end. For me, I find it hard to create content by doing the headline and then building the body.

I usually build the body and then let that generate some headline ideas and then I can sort of figure out. ‘OK how do I be concise?’ How do I say something that’s very valuable and keyword targeted, and how do I be relevant with it.

Then I create the headline from there.

With the metrics we’ve mentioned, do you think business owners should start using ads to target their content?

Matt Mroczek: It depends on the type of content.

I would say middle and bottom funnel type of content is great for retargeting. Because if people have already come to your site and left, they at least know who you are. And if it’s good content they should know what you care about, what you stand for, what you believe in, what you’re solving, and then use that middle and bottom of funnel type content to then get them back to your site.

So for example, if you create awareness around running shoes and you’re trying to get people to understand how to live a healthy lifestyle. Perfect top of funnel content.

People can look at it and then if you want to retarget them to get them back on your site… Do a product comparison or something similar that is a great middle of funnel type content.

So then you can start saying OK we already know you understand the problem and solution, you’re probably evaluating options at this point, I want you to know that we’re the best.

Matt Lo: That’s pretty interesting. So you might actually, in a different example, if you’re selling shoes, you might target someone with an ad going to a landing page.

They bounce and you might retarget them with a particular piece of content that might match their audience segment and that would be a great time to bring traffic to that content.

And then the goal for that would be a share, comment or an email/direct message(DM).

Matt Mroczek: When you’re just looking at the success of your content and your blog content in particular, what’s the easiest trap to fall in?

Matt Lo: Assuming your content is going to work.

Oftentimes, and we’ve had this problem too, you write blog content in the hopes you’re going to get customers.

It’s this trap that everyone falls into and you just have to recalibrate your mindset. Your job is to deliver free value and by doing that, you’re getting more attention and then you can use this attention to advertise your product.

That’s usually the key trap and that means your metrics need to be flipped.

You have to be looking at metrics that maybe don’t really give you money, but they’re precursors to what your onboarding metrics would look like.

When it comes to distribution, what’s the most important metric to be looking for?

Matt Mroczek: You want to be looking at the source traffic.

If you’re really trying to get your blog content out there, then what you’re looking for is backlinks and shares.

People who like your content, sharing it, and even quoting or backlink it later on. Then you can start measuring the reach of your content and start looking at how much traffic is coming from other sites.

Some might be sites that you have reached out to because maybe you quoted an author in your content. But you can also look at who’s sharing my content as well and then either reach out to them or just get a good grasp on what your sphere of influence is.

Matt Lo: What’s your favorite tool for determining backlinks?

Matt Mroczek: Ahrefs is a good one. Spyfu is a great one. There’s really a lot of tools… Google Analytics is also going to tell you where people are coming from.

And then that can help you try to figure out, ‘Okay, if somebody wrote about another topic somewhere else and linked my content… What content and what audience are they going after that I can tap into as well’ if my product has relevance there.