Mike Stelzner and the Social Media Examiner team are at it again. Raising the bar yet one more time. 2010 was already super successful with two of the most recognized events of the year “Facebook Success Summit” and “Social Media Success Summit”, which were attended by more than 4,400 people.
But in 2011 SME is planning to start early with their new Blogging Success Summit opening on February 1st and running through the 22nd.
Look At All This Value
Here is some of the value delivered in the summit:
- Discover the best ways to market your business with a blog
- Find out how to build an engaging blog presence
- Discover innovative ways to generate quality leads and increase sales with your blog
- Learn how to drive traffic to your blog with Facebook and other social media platforms
- Discover how to grow a loyal blog readership
- See how successful businesses built their blogs
- Gain a leg up on your competitors
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Blog traffic, content engagement, online community, social proof, all key aspects of blog marketing. All easily measurable items. But the ultimate goal is one and today my dear friends, we are going to talk about how to measure blog conversion.
Conversion can mean different things for different people. If you blog as a marketing vehicle there are usually two ways of looking at it: a 1-Step process where you directly sell a product and a 2-Step, where your blog focuses on converting a visitor into a prospect, in other words, what we know as Lead Generation. This is usually done through email subscriptions.
Either way, you need to have a way of measuring and visualizing your blog’s performance. Is this possible? Not only it’s possible, it’s also easier than you think.
But let’s start at the beginning. We’ll create an example to explain the process. Let’s pretend you are a consultant/coach for entrepreneurs.
Business Objective vs. Digital Goals
Your business objective has nothing to do with the Internet, it’s a general objective. In this example you sell coaching sessions, you need to find clients that will put you on a retainer for a period of time. That’s your service.
Your digital goals are of course, online focused. What you are trying to accomplish with your blog to get you closer to your business objective. For this example, let’s say that you create content on your blog to attract visitors and on top of that, you have developed other free products to offer those visitors in exchange of an email subscription.
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What is your company’s blogging strategy?
That is one of the first questions I ask when talking to a client for the first time. I understand it’s not a simple question, specially if the company hasn’t been blogging yet.
Just to give you an idea, the answer involves things like how often are you planning to publish content, who is in charge of developing this content, what’s the plan for front-end interaction, how is it going to be distributed and where. That is of course, besides knowing exactly what is the business goal behind blogging and how it integrates with the rest of your marketing overall strategy.
It’s 2am in Santiago, Chile. I arrived yesterday at 1am after a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles that was originally delayed almost 24 hours. I’m finally in my room after a day of meetings and writing a huge proposal. After the February earthquake, I admit I’m not too thrilled about the 16th floor but at least it overlooks beautiful Las Condes business center, so I’ll focus on that.
I wrote and published a post before flying since I knew I wouldn’t have the time during my stay here. You know, I try to be consistent with that stuff and write at least once a week. It’s been almost 48 hours and I barely go back to my blog to see what’s up before crashing, I’m really half-way crashed as you can imagine. BUT, I see that my post has more than 200 Retweets and quite a few comments I haven’t reply too… I guess I’m not going to sleep yet.
Am I insane? Let me ask you this, if you just finished speaking in front of an audience and now you open for some Q&A time, people start expressing their thoughts on your subject and asking you questions, would you respond to them? or would you ignore them and just stay quiet?
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Usually when other blogs post your content is a good thing, you increase your visibility, you get some extra traffic and depending on the blog, it could even be good for your search engine ranking.
But wait! There is also a negative side to it. There is a fine line between aggregation and just hijacking content. In this posts we’ll review two different real-life scenarios based on the same piece of content and we’ll discuss the etiquette for good honest aggregation, what not to do and how if affects the source.
We’ll take one of SocialMouths posts from just a few days ago: 13 Quick Tips To Write A Successful Post, a piece that was republished by a few blogs in different ways.
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