Marketing is my thing. Like this is what I sell to my clients every day. And I’m so impossibly shit at doing it for myself; it’s really pathetic. So, what did I do today? I planned to rectify this situation a bit. Let’s just say that I’m my worst enemy sometimes, and my harshest critic.
I am terrified of social media. There I said it. I’m scared of the very thing that makes my business possible. But it’s not in the way you may think…
I made what most would call a big mistake: I deleted about half of my blog posts from five years ago. I spent months reading into the repercussions of this and how it would affect my Google search rank, and how it would impact the volume of my blog. None of it mattered in the end.
After writing for nearly eight years, I grew as a writer, and will continue to grow. I read some of the content from way back when and wondered why the hell I wrote about that. Why would I have written 573 words of nothing. My writing goals were very different back then. I was writing to make noise. Today, I am writing to make a point. At least I hope that I make a point.
“If you write it, they will come.”
No. They won’t.
Yes, they will.
No. They won’t.
Well, maybe ten years ago.
But, not today.
Blogging is not just about writing a couple articles and calling it a day. You have to research, write, edit, edit, edit, format, insert rich media content, *preview*, then publish. THEN the work really begins.
After you hit that publish button, what do you think happens? Do you think that some random magic blog fairy will tell all her fairy friends and they will shower you with traffic? Maybe in someone’s fantasy world, but not in the real world.
You have to publish it on social media networks, you have to email the links to all your friends and ask them to share it with their friends, and so on.
Little by little the traffic will grow, but you have to work hard. Your blog is a brand, and you have to do put in the man hours to make that brand popular, unless you don’t care about your blog, then you can just move along to my next article.
Every day, you have to network a little on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else you think your traffic lives. If you’re a serious blogger, I would even suggest buying some Google and Facebook ads to generate some traffic, and hopefully, you will be able to keep that traffic.
Then you have newsletters, which are so important now. You have to send consistent newsletters to keep everyone in the loop about your blog’s latest content. And putting together a newsletter takes time and some level of skill, and lots of Youtubing.
You also have to share your evergreen content (the content which is relevent no matter the date it was published). Tools like Buffer come in handy for this because you can buffer that content and then scroll through the list later on and rebuffer.
The great thing about this is that you can do this yourself, for just 15-30 minutes a day. And it’s not hard stuff, it’s hard to remember to do for most of us. People who write creatively are sometimes not the same kinds of people who will remember the somewhat mundane, routine tasks. But once you look at it as a part of your blogging routine, and it’s on the same priority levels as your blog, then you’ll be on the right track. It’s all a part of the wonderful world of blogging 🙂
How many of your users are new? How many are returning? How engaged are they? How many pages deep are they getting? You can get all these statistics in Google Analytics. I’ll help you answer those questions in this article.
This feels like an age-old question, and in many ways it is. Shops know their new customers and they know their returning or repeat customers, so why aren’t you looking at yours?
We would have looked at this briefly in the first article on the basics, but this time we’re going to look at it on a deeper level.
The bounce rate seems to be higher for returning visitors rather than new visitors, however, returning seem to spend more time reading more articles than the new visitors.
Page depth tells you after your user has visited your site, what next they do. Do they leave (which increases the bounce rate) or do they read another article.
Here we can see that most sessions read two articles, but the interesting stat is the last one, 7 sessions read 20+ pages, which means that there are users who just sit and read article after article. Great if you’re content driven!
This is a more detailed breakdown of your time on site or session duration.
Sadly, 331 sessions lasted less than 10 seconds which is really bad for content. However, there is a bright side, there are over 50 users spending more than 3 minutes on the website, which is not great, but could be worse.
The User Flow allows you to see your traffic more clearly, and you’d be quite surprised by the stats.
Green indicates traffic coming in, and the red bits are the drop offs. Here you can see how the traffic just whittles down into nothing. Nearly all the traffic which started on an article dropped off, indicating a lack of engagement. Few who started on the home page did go to other pages, but then, they just disappeared.
Users need to be more engaged. The session duration was pretty poor, even though the page depth seemed to be in a better state. There is also a high number of users dropping off after an article. This would indicate that a better content navigation system should be in place. Also, most of the users are new users, and not enough returning. Content topics should be re-evaluted for efficacy.
I’m Désiré, a professional writer and marketing expert. I run an creative agency called TILT Creative, specialising in content creation and managed solutions for social media, blogs and websites.
Here I publish blogs, articles and book snippets.
Enjoy the word vomit, and don’t forget to follow and share 🙂
From TILT Creative