Not only can a company blog boost your search engine rankings, but you can gain a lot of insight into your audience by paying attention to your blog analytics. There are two sets of metrics you can look at, and each gives you different information. First, your overall blog stats provide information on your market as a whole. Second, stats on your blog subscribers tell you more about your most loyal followers.
Feedback From Prospects. Comparing the total number of views for each blog post gives you an idea of what topics are of most interest to your prospects. This can guide you when formulating future blog posts, and may also help guide other prospecting efforts.
If your goal is to attract new prospects, have a look at the posts that drive the most traffic, and see what they have in common. For instance, the highest viewership of all Let’s Grow Blog posts are as follows:
- Should you capitalize your email subject line?
- Good examples of email signup requests
- A treasure trove of email marketing facts
- What’s a good email open rate?
- The three types of business buyers
- What’s the most readable typeface?
- Email signup best practices: a great example
- Lessons from the Garden Watchdog Top 30
If you read Let’s Grow Blog regularly, you know that we cover much more than email marketing — so the fact that 5 out of the 8 most-viewed blog posts were on email marketing tells me it’s a hot topic. In addition, examples and case histories seem to help boost popularity. It’s also interesting to note that 3 of the most popular posts used questions in the headline.
Once you’ve determined what’s of greatest interest to your prospects, consider how you can leverage that information. For instance, your blog analytics can help determine on which keywords to concentrate your SEO and paid search efforts. Or you might repurpose your blog content by compiling popular posts into a special report and offering it as a bonus for new enewsletter subscribers.
Feedback From Subscribers. You can also learn from the topics that your blog subscribers respond to best. Assuming you use Feedburner to distribute your blog, you can get statistics on how many times each post was viewed or clicked on. You might assume that those statistics correspond with the posts that drive the most traffic, but that’s not necessarily so. For instance, here are the most popular posts among Let’s Grow Blog subscribers:
- Advice from a successful Facebook marketer
- Burpee’s latest innovation in selling to younger gardeners
- Online strategies for selling to the 55+ market
- A clever idea for choosing products for catalog covers
- Two keys to double-digit growth
- Leveraging your Facebook page on your website
- A simple way to reduce your return rate
- Is this a larger traffic source than Facebook?
Not one of these posts was on e-mail marketing, which was by far the most popular topic among prospects. Among subscribers, Facebook-related topics topped the list. Specific how-to strategies were also a common theme among the most popular posts for subscribers.
If your main goal is to build a strong relationship with your best customers, pay attention to the topics that engage your blog subscribers.
The more you learn about what motivates your customers and prospects, the more successful your marketing will be. Blogs are just one more tool to help you home in on their strongest interests and give them more of what they want.
