Welcome to issue 5 of More Content = More Cash! Time flies when you are blogging! Hope the past five weeks have been useful and your sites are coming on leaps and bounds! This issue follows nicely on from issue 4. Where we looked at setting up various social media channels and how to make best use of them. Today we are going to look into sustaining your viral fire and how to keep it going. How to keep them fresh and active and most importantly how to keep people coming back to your wonderful content filled site! So read on if you want to know more….
Issue 5: Sustaining Online Utopia
Information is Power
In business, the military and in sport we all depend on the information cycle to gain a competitive edge. This cycle of information is processed to provide solid theory determining how we are to respond and is important to any competitive discipline. This cycle involves information gathering, processing or analysing and responding to the conclusions it draws. Success on the web is no different and due to the digital nature of the Internet, stats are available in all sorts of metrics. I covered the basics of getting setup in analytics in issue 1 but in this issue I aim to explain the important metrics and how to use them to your advantage.
Goals
Google Analytics (GA) allows you to set up 4 goals per account. A goal is simply something you define as a measurement that is useful to you. For dating, this goal tends to be a ‘basic sign up’ which is defined as the action of sign up from a registration form through to the success page. In GA, you setup the goals by defining these pages as a goal. Please see GA’s official help documentation to learn more about setting up goals. Once set up, you can use this goal to filter referral statistics to check what campaigns/sites are working best for you so you know where to focus your efforts. Please speak to your account manager should you need any help setting up GA or setting up goals.
Referrers & Segments
The most important metrics you will tend to observe are the ‘Absolute Unique Visitors’ (Those who have visited your site for the first time) from the traffic list. GA splits traffic down into 3 categories; direct, search and referrals. ‘Direct’ traffic comes from the user typing in the address bar or clicking a bookmark link. ‘Search’ traffic comes from a search engine and ‘Referral’ traffic is anyone who arrived at your site by clicking a link to it from another site. Pretty simple stuff but making use of segments will really help filter the referral traffic down further. Since GA doesn’t have a concept of social media sites, it is worth setting up a ‘social media’ segment.
Here’s a useful video showing you how segments work:
You can adapt the above example for any groups of sites that are relevant to you and how you wish to track. The idea is that you use the goal to filter the various segments/referral traffic so you can identify which traffic is working for you in order to target your efforts.
Sustaining the Social Media Fire
Now you know what is working in terms of traffic, you can start to analyse the type of content that particular segment is responsive to and produce more of it. There’s no great secret to success here, it’s simply frequent content that you know works well. For the first few weeks/months you’ll likely to experiment with different campaigns, messaging and content but as long as you have the analytics in place, you can easily track what’s successful.
Another very important factor is SEO. Viral campaigns have a 2-pronged attack giving you both referral traffic and increased SEO from high value back-links. Stick to linking rules as discussed in previous issues, using high value keywords in links back to your site from within any picture/video descriptions, blog titles, blog content, tweets and any other mediums where this is possible.
In summary, the key ingredients include:
- Topical content that captures the target market interest
- Various multimedia to seed the various social media channels
- Tracking and analysing traffic from these external sources and how they meet your KPI (basic signup goal in this case)
- Targeting areas of strength gained from analysis
- Frequency of new content
- Back-links containing keywords and phrases you wish to rank highly on
Next week, we’ll be finishing this series with a summary of all 5 issues and links to further reading highlighting some of the topics covered in more detail. Don’t fret, we’ll soon be starting up a new series focusing on getting the best out of PPC (Pay Per Click) and paid advertising, so watch this space!
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