You know the ROI (return on investment) on products you sell and services you offer, right? What is your blog’s ROI? If you aren’t certain, then you will want to read on. Knowing the metrics and readership and bounce rates on your site is something you need to know, but knowing whether you’re spending too much time or money on your blog and not finding any correlation between that work and cash and time outlay and increases in sales is something a business savvy professional needs to do.
You can certainly, also buy ads to drive traffic to your site or to your social media pages, and you can buy ads on the site itself, but is that worth the investment? What’s the ROI on that expenditure?
What Is Your Blog’s ROI?
when you think of your blog, chances are you are looking at its search engine optimization and how many new eyes are seeing your content. New readers and new followers to your blog might eventually bring in new clients — that’s what it’s all about, right?
Here are a few tips for calculating the ROI of the blog.
- Create content that your expert readers want
- Create content that newbie readers and first-time visitors to your site want
- Create content that your intermediate reading audience wants and needs
Determine how many times per month you will be posting then do some math: Create 25% of your content for intermediate readers and another 25% for experts. The remaining 50% of your content should appeal to a new audience.
Work from an editorial calendar
Sit down with your content calendar and with whomever creates that content and put together a content aka editorial calendar for the quarter. Once you’ve created a quarterly editorial calendar, update this calendar and extend it by one month at the end of each month. Take the time when you’re extending your calendar to look back on the success or failures of your past content.
Create content that is “evergreen.” This content is the type that offers:
- Good advice that can be used any time of the year
- Monthly specific. For example: In January many magazines cover topics related to resolutions; September is back to school, etc. Look at magazine covers regularly and see what type of content many of them are offering at the same time of the year — just with a different slant.
- Post on a regular schedule and post as frequently as you can (at least once a week)
Your blog and your editorial calendar need to be living, breathing documents that you review, update and switch up to adapt with your readership and the current trends.
Do you have an editorial calendar? Do you review it regularly? Do you know the ROI of your blog?