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Practice Management > Marketing and Communications > Social Media

Is your blog doing its job?

By Amy McIlwain

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If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, there is nothing you can do that will have a more powerful effect on your numbers than blogging. That’s because when it comes to your website, content is king. Website visitors and search engines evaluate your site based on content. It’s vital to your online success and can help determine whether leads turn into clients.

Business blogging is best defined as an initiative aimed at increasing website traffic or building brand visibility. And like all business initiatives, the success of your blog needs to be measured. You need to discover whether or not your blog is doing its job and generating traffic. You need to know if it’s satisfying this function, so that you can make changes if you find out that it’s not.

Here are two easy-to-measure metrics you can track with a free Google Analytics account:

1. Individual post views. Measuring the number of views your blog receives can be very insightful. But, dig a little deeper and you can unlock the magic of these analytics. The performance of your blog hinges on your content, so make use of your blog’s marketing analytics to improve your content-creation efforts. For example, if you find that a post about retirement planning gets 50 percent more views than a post about budgeting, try to tailor your writing to an audience interested in retirement planning.

2. Traffic and referral sources. Analyzing where the traffic to your blog comes from is the easiest way to improve your content, promotion and distribution and gain more traffic. Let’s say you’ve posted videos on YouTube in order to raise brand awareness. You might want to see whether those videos are driving visitors to your site or whether YouTube shows up as a top source of referrals. Information contained in this report lets you see traffic from sources you may not have considered, such as news stories you didn’t know about or popular bloggers who may have discovered you.

A business blog is a chance to address prospects, clients and the public at large. Make sure you know whether yours is hitting the mark so you make the most of this important marketing tool.

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Amy McIlwain is a professional speaker on social media and President of Financial Social Media, an online marketing firm specializing in the financial industry. She can be reached through her website www.financialsocialmedia.com and on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

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