As content creators we sit down at our computers, check out the content calendar and get started on the day’s work.
Whether we are employed, or work for someone else, we get into the habit of pumping out that content.
Sure, we work hard to create quality content. We optimize it, whether for the search engines or social media. We submit it. It’s published. And our work is done. On to the next page or post.
If you work alone, writing for your own sites, that page is now behind you, and you focus on what to write next.
If you are employed, you write the page, and what happens after that is in someone else’s hands.
That’s a great way to keep the content flowing, but it isn’t a very good way to ensure that your content is continually improving.
If you are employed, hopefully someone in the company is monitoring the performance of all your content, and providing you with a steady flow of feedback.
If you work alone, writing your own sites, then you need to carve out some time to perform your own analysis of the content you wrote last week, last month and last year.
Remember, just because a particular page or post was well written and optimized, doesn’t automatically make it a successful piece of content.
And that brings us to the first point in establishing some kind of quality assessment process you can apply to your content.
And that first point is this – how do you measure success?
Here are some metrics you might want to measure:
– Total visitors to the page
– Time spend on the page
– Number of times the page is shared through social media
– Number of times a page is found through organic search
– Number of times someone clicks through from that page to another page on your site
Beyond, that – all of it useful to know – you also need to know whether a particular page of content contributed to your bottom line.
– Did it generate any income, directly or indirectly?
– Did it lead to a new lead capture or subscriber?
Without analysing your content in this way, you may find yourself creating what appears to be great content, but without achieving the broader goals of your website or business.
What should you do?
If there is nobody else who can do it for you, you need to put aside some time to identify those pages, recent and old, which are the most successful.
Print out those top pages, lay them down side by side, and try to identify what it was that made them work so well.
Was it the content itself? Was it SEO? Was it SMO? Why did those pages perform so much better than the others?
Once you have figured that out, try to create more pages with the same, positive attributes.
This may sound obvious, but as I said at the start of the article, too many of us get caught up in the process of just creating more and more content.
Far better to identify your best-performing content, figure out what made them work so well, and then use that as a guide or template as you move forward.
In other words, you should always be focused on a process of continuous improvement – based on clear metrics.
Don’t just write good content, write successful content.
About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…
Very good points, Nick. Thanks for reminding us that we need to go beyond just cranking out good content. Most of us know to use metrics to track every other aspect of our web presence so it makes perfect sense to use it to create successful content.