Considering that successful blogging takes a good investment of time and effort, it’s no wonder that a Technorati survey found that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned. According to Shane Snow writing for Mashable, part of the reason for low blog success rates is that most of us have a hard time predicting what kind of return blogging will achieve and measuring the return on investment is difficult, especially if you’re not judging success by ad revenue. Snow suggests three ways to effectively measure your content strategy:
1. Understand What You’re Measuring. In content marketing the goal is typically to achieve some sort of conversion or to build “brand awareness,” a rather ambiguous metric. A conversion can consist of a mailing list or an RSS subscriber, a user signup, a phone call, a sale or any number of user interactions. The first step to measuring ROI on your content strategy is to set a goal. If your content goal is to increase user signups, you first need to know your baseline: how many signups are you getting now, and from what sources? From there, measure your results against that baseline.
2. Use Proxies to Measure Initial Success. Unless you’re already starting with a large audience, it’s going to take a while to build momentum, and even longer to start seeing conversions. However, several proxies can help you chart your progress: Facebook likes, retweets, LinedIn and other shares, reblogs, links back, comments, time spent on page, average page views per visitor, followers, and @mentions. “Though it may not seem like much, an average of five tweets on a post today versus an average of one tweet three weeks ago is a great sign of progress,” Snow says.
3. Measure Both Primary and Secondary Conversion Indicators. Measuring conversions can be as simple as installing Google Analytics, or keeping a spreadsheet of leads or even tick marks on a whiteboard. While keeping track of the raw conversion numbers is important, it’s also crucial to measure secondary indicators. If you’re measuring leads, these might include: Quality of leads, retention period, lifetime value per lead, length of sales cycle, and number of new customers referred by lead.
Read more at Mashable.
