Tag: content marketing | Page 4

If you take a look at the sidebar to the right of this post, you’ll see the Lijit logo next to the search box. Lijit is a third-party search platform for bloggers – and a heck of a lot more on top.

While it’s perfectly fine to use whatever standard search box comes with your blogging platform (or add something like Google Custom Search), using Lijit takes all the goodness of your search box options and then amplifies it to the power of, oh, eleventy billion or so.

Here’s why.

Snapshot Audience Intelligence

While you can’t beat something like Google Analytics or Woopra for a full-on overview of your site traffic, Lijit gives you a great and user-friendly checklist for you to see how your blog is performing and help you target areas to work on.

By looking at these stats for the last 30 days on here, I can see that I had just under 20,000 unique readers, but just over 48,500 page views. So this tells me that the average reader is spending time checking out at least one more page or post while they’re here – great for keeping your bounce rate down.

Additionally, I can also see that almost a quarter of these page views came from search engines, which is great news since it means I’m not relying solely on social networks for my audience. So, if Twitter or Facebook died overnight, I’d still have a nice amount of blog traffic. It also means my SEO (search engine optimization) is working too, for the topics I want to be found for.

I can also see what the most popular search is – both on-site and off-site – and I can use that to tailor future blog posts and topics.

Blog Content Guidance By Your Audience

While I always say that you need to be writing for you first and that everything else is a bonus, it also makes perfect sense to ensure you’re at least aware of what your audience wants to read about. After all, they’re the ones that make blogging so enjoyable, by sharing their thoughts in the comments and making you look at topics in a new light.

So why wouldn’t you want to write on something that clearly interests them (and bring new readers to your blog into the bargain)?

Look at the figure to the right, for instance, and you can see that one of the most popular search terms in the last 30 days has been for “social media facts”, or other keyword terms based around that.

That search is pretty understandable, since I wrote a post last year on 52 cool social media facts that turned out to be pretty popular and resulted in a lot of social shares and syndication.

However, because Lijit shows me within my dashboard that this is still a pretty popular term – and the original post was written last summer, so the stats are already out of date – then perhaps I should be thinking of updating the post, and include newer networks.

Additionally, I can ask myself whether it might be an option for me to compile an ebook, which looks at the stats and collates them into a more flowing form.

And, say I was to offer some strategies based around the social media facts, could that ebook be premium, or would I want to offer it as a free ebook, which could then lead to premium offerings down the line?

So as you can see, already I’m starting to get a feel for my audience and understand both the current readers, and those coming in from search engines and what they’re looking for while they’re here.

Location Based Marketing – Not Just for Mobile

By using Lijit so far, I’m seeing where my audience is coming from, and what searches are happening not only off-site, but on-site too. This is allowing me to build up my audience’s profile which in turn is helping me write content that they’re going to read.

This is key for both personal and business blogs, and everything in between.

But then we can start taking that one step further, and really start writing content for a specific target audience. Not only that, but then we can start using our other social profiles in a far more strategic way.

For example, you can see by looking at the image on the right that there are two key pieces of information that stand out, that I could tailor into future posts:

A lot of U.S. visitors are looking for information about social media trends for 2011.
A lot of Canadian visitors are looking for information on podcasting.

This means I can now tailor some posts around social media trends and how they affect U.S. social media users for the next six months or so.

These can be for personal social media use in the U.S.; mobile browsing; social media and business use in the U.S.; is the U.S. falling behind in social media use compared to the rest of the world or leading the way; and more.

Switching to Canada, I could then tailor posts based around podcasting and its position within the Canadian space. Is it more popular in Canada than elsewhere; are there opportunities for guest posts from Canadian podcasters; can businesses use podcasting more in Canada, as opposed to text or video blogging?

These are just some of the approaches I could take. As you look more into the Lijit dashboard and the intelligence it builds around your readers – especially internal searches from the Lijit search box – you can really begin to blog strategically. Which is perfect for growing your existing blog audience.

The Added Bonus of Community Content

While Lijit is great for intelligence based around your readers and audience, one of the things I really like about the platform is how it lets you promote other parts of your own network, and that of your community.

When you set up your Lijit account, you can add all your other profiles from around the web (as seen by the Content Tab on the search result in the image below). This then lets you pull search results from other blogs you might have, or your company website, or video channels, etc.

Next to the Content Tab is your Network Tab. This looks to your social profiles, along with any blogs you may link out to via your blogroll, and shares similar posts based around the search term on your blog.

The nice thing about this is that you’re not only allowing your reader to get the most comprehensive results for their query, you’re also sharing the cool folks you’re connected with and (potentially) driving traffic to their site too. Which is nice.

These are just some of the ways you can use Lijit to build a content marketing strategy for your blog. There are more, and this recent case study by Marketing Sherpa expands on some of these (disclosure – it features a certain Scotsman…).

Any blogger will tell you that knowing your audience is key – Lijit makes this just that little bit more effective. Which is never a bad thing, right?

Last week, I released a free 33-page ebook titled 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook.

As the title suggests, it offered a few ways you could use Facebook to take your business to your customers, by using the platform’s various strengths – Pages, Apps, Ads, etc, – as a jumping-off point. But there was a small “catch”, if you like.

As an experiment in offering exclusive content tailored specifically to connect the relevant platform and users, I limited availability of the ebook. Instead of sharing via this blog, or uploading as a presentation on Slideshare, you could only get it via my Facebook Page, and only if you liked the page in question.

The reason was two-fold – I wanted to see how popular platform-specific content would be (after all, my blog would probably offer more chance of traction), and I also wanted to use it as an experiment to show clients how Facebook can be used to increase brand awareness.

And it’s been interesting to see the results. Here are just some of the key metrics.

Facebook Metrics

The day before the ebook was made public, there were 190 people that ?liked? my Facebook page. The day of publication, that jumped to 265. The day after that, 389. Now, one week later, the number sits at 466 at the time of writing this post ? an increase of?more than 245%.

Because the ebook was only available via Facebook, and only after you liked the page, I made sure that there were no “hidden clauses” once you’d downloaded the ebook. If you wished, you could unlike immediately – the onus was on me to make sure I tried to keep you interested with content that you’d find interesting after the ebook was finished.

So far, it seems to be working – only 7 people have unsubscribed since the ebook went live last week. I think that’s a pretty acceptable number for any new subscribers that came just for the ebook itself.

Additionally, the continued interaction on the page has stayed steady even after the initial “rush” for the download. Daily active users increased by more than a third, and new Likers continues to grow as well.

The demographic breakdown was pretty interesting, as it showed a distinctly different readership from my blog analytics. While the majority of traffic to this blog according to Google and Quantcast is male and 35+, the split for the Facebook page is a lot closer.

In fact, there’s little to separate things when you look at users that fall within the 24-54 age group. Something to keep in mind as I share content on the page in future.

Traffic and Downloads

Of course, the Facebook numbers only tell half the story. Once you liked the Facebook page (if you hadn’t already), you were then given a download link to get the free ebook.

To measure the traffic here, I used a vanity URL via bit.ly, and tied that into Google Analytics for web visits. Again, it was pretty interesting to see where the traffic came from and the peak periods.

The bit.ly traffic shows that my request to keep the download Facebook-exclusive was “honoured” (and thank you so much for that!).

While I wasn’t stopping anyone from sharing away from Facebook, for the experiment to work, keeping the ebook limited to that platform would be the best way to gauge how successful the exclusive approach was.

As bit.ly shows, of the 368 downloads, 358 came from the vanity URL, of which 340 came directly from the Free Ebook tab I set up on my Facebook Page just for this experiment. Only 13 “cheated” and sent folks directly to the download link.

I’m more than happy with this figure, though, as there were no hard and fast “rules” to stop anyone from sharing the download link outside Facebook. So again, thanks everyone for “playing the game”.

The Google Analytics stats show how overall site traffic increased both just after the launch, and with my mention on Twitter about writing the post you’re reading now. Connect that to the steady ongoing traffic?that the post is still receiving, and it shows that the experiment had, and still has, some good traction.

So, again, positive results – so far, so good.

Takeaways and Future Plans

So what’s the point in all these figures, graphs and information? After all, it’s just an ebook, right? Well, yes and no.

As I mentioned in the original post, I made the ebook an exclusive to Facebook to see how it compared to more traditional offers. The last free ebook I did,?Why Simple Works, was shared via my blog and Slideshare and could also be embedded or sent via email. That saw more than 1,400 eventual downloads, all told. So, a distinct drop in numbers with the Facebook one.

However, the 1,400 downloads for Why Simple Works only made up about 35% of the traffic to the various download options. The stats for 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook saw downloads accounting for almost 77% – more than double the “popular” multi-platform sharing option.

It also saw a 245% increase in platform audience – something the more open sharing of the previous ebook didn’t achieve.

Now, think of this information as a business:

77% active participation in an offer
245% increase in your core audience
Jump in web traffic of more than 250%
36% growth in daily user interaction

If this had been a business or non-profit promotion and you had these figures, I think it’s safe to say that it could be viewed as a pretty successful campaign, no?

From a personal viewpoint, I’ll definitely be offering more platform-exclusive content (look out for an ebook on social responsibility within the workplace soon from the SRM Group).

From an experiment point if view, I think it’s something that can be of value to show clients why Facebook can be such a useful platform for promotions and incentives. And that’s immediate value right there.

How about you? Have you offered anything similar? And if you downloaded the ebook, was it worth the “extra step” you had to take to get it, and do you see value in exclusives?