TILT Your Marketing

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.

I grew as a Writer.

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.

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“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 work for your traffic, honey.

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.

New versus Returning Readers

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

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!

Session Duration

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.

User Flow

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.

All in all…

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.

Do marketing specialists just throw out campaigns willy-nilly without doing any research on the market? No. So why are you spewing out content without looking at the audience you’re capturing? You need to know who is reading your content, because without it, your bounce rate will skyrocket, and your visits will be at an all time low.

Like this:

People want to read content that’s relevant to them. They want content that speaks to them. If you are reaching readers who are in Canada or the UK but you’re directing your content for readers in the African continent, none of whom are actually reading, then you need to re-evaluate your method of targeting your desired audience, or your content.

Google Analytics will help with your writing

Getting to know who your readers are will help with the type of content you’re putting out there. As said before, if you have readers in one country, but are writing for another country then maybe you should look at writing for content targeted for the country your readers are coming from.

Similarly, if you have a fashion blog, targeting young women between 18 to 25, but your audience is older, then perhaps you should tailor your content for an older audience. Or worse, what if you’re getting more male viewers? Then maybe you should change some of those photos…

So seeing who is reading can help with your content writing and niches.

Google Analytics can decide how you market your content

If you do not want to change the content strategy of your blog, then Google Analytics can help you target the people you’re interested in reaching.

So you have this fashion blog, and you want to reach young women between 18 and 25, but you’re currently reaching more women over 40, what do you do? You can use Facebook and Google ads quickly reach them, or you can go a step deeper (especially if you don’t have the money) and find the people you want to target and interact with them on social media.

If you determine that your target market is on Pinterest, then by all means, go there, connect with people, share your content with them and ask them to share it with their connections.

Google Analytics will determine your design

What if you have a great desktop design with no mobile layout, or a not-so-great-for-mobile responsive design, and most of your readers are using mobile devices? You’ve failed them. So, look at your system trends in Google Analytics, and determine how many of your readers are using mobile devices and design your website around that.

Most templates these days come with a decent responsive feature, but sometimes it might not be enough for your readers, especially to encourage more reading to lower your bounce rate; you can consider developing a mobile theme, or even a mobile sub domain (like how Facebook has m.facebook.com) so users from a mobile device will get redirected there.

Also, the sizes of their screens play a big part in blogging. You may have a 1920×1080 resolution screen, but your readers may have a 1024×768 display. If your design isn’t catering for different screen sizes, then it may be time to get another design which does. This can cause your content to look like a mess, which will only encourage users to skyrocket your bounce rate, instead of reading more.

On the flip side, if your readers have a larger resolution screen than you do, then you should consider a design which supports that, else your blog could look like a thin block on a wide space; not conducive to reading.

What if I don’t care?

If you have a lifestyle blog, and you don’t care about who reads your stuff, where they are from, how many people read it, if they are using a mobile device or desktop, then by all means, move along and ignore everything you learned in this article.

But if you do care, and you want to know who your readers are, and where they are from and the devices they are using, then look for the other content I have on this website which talks about Google Analytics, and if you have any questions, you can send me a note via the contact form on this website, or on Twitter @desireroberts.