Content creation has come a long way from just being a source of entertainment to a full-time profession thus giving rise to content creators. Impacting others with your ideas and content has become a profitable industry. But there are a few important things rookie content creators must know before starting their journey.
Creating content is the process that appeals to your reader/audience, designing written or visual matter around ideas and making that available as a video, audio, article, or another format. It might sound befuddling but do not worry, we have compiled some amazing tools which will help you in tracking the performance and footprint of your work.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is an easy-to-use tool available to anyone who has a WordPress domain. It makes SEO simpler by giving you green, orange, and red traffic lights to tell you if your content is optimized. Additionally, it provides you with the means to improve the readability and SEO of your material. They offer you enough functionality to get you going and to rank a few pages. The Yoast SEO exercises lead you through crucial routine SEO activities and assist you in finding chances for optimization, such as obscure, unlinked content on your website. Use Yoast to understand if your content is SEO optimized with the right keyword and if your content is user-friendly.
Here's an excellent resource on keyword research.
Google Analytics
To comprehend how well your content is performing across various platforms, use Google Analytics' user-friendly interface. You also have the option of examining your content marketing efforts at the web site-wide or page-by-page level. It provides measures for traffic, navigation, conversion, and organic search that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. You can access all of your data and insights in one location. You can track user-level interactions with the tool to gain an understanding of how your audience interacts with your material.
Get started on Google Analytics for beginningers.
Hootsuite
While Yoast can help you structure your blog post and Google Analytics can help you understand what posts are performing better, Hootsuite can help you manage your social media channels. Right from scheduling to performance to answering comments, Hootsuite – even the free version – can help you do more with your social media presence by spending less time on it. Grow your social media presence and understand what is working for you.
Measure your content's performance with this starter toolkit.
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We have discussed tools that will help in understanding the performance of your blog or article. Now comes what exactly you should be measuring:
1. Traffic to the site
In the world of content creation, traffic to your website is a key indicator of your content’s performance. At the same time, you need to keep track of the bounce rate. It is the rate of people who are navigating out after viewing just one page. It usually rises when your content is not intriguing and cannot hook the readers.
Site traffic helps in knowing the number of visitors coming to your blog or website, the number of pages they view, which content is popular, which pages or parts of pages are visited more often, and tracking the most common trends in the region.
You can use Google Analytics, Matomo, Open web analytics, and Clicky to understand everything about viewer traffic.
2. Time spent on the site
It is crucial to understand if the visitors have liked your content or not. It is usually addressed as on-site time or dwell time. It measures the number of minutes your audience spends on pages or articles. Content performance and on-site time are directly proportional. If the time on a page or site is high then your content is good and if it’s not very interesting then people will navigate away. Most importantly the pages or website must load fast. Readers can lose interest if the web page is taking too long to respond.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Your content needs to be optimized for the search engine. SEO is a way of bettering the quality and quantity of viewers coming to your website. Under this, the goal is to maximize organic or natural traffic instead of inorganic or redirected traffic. SEO is important to improve your position in the searches.
Steps to get you started on SEO.
4. Ease of navigation
Readers will lose interest if they are not able to navigate easily on your website or pages and consume the content. Similarly, the audience must be able to understand your content easily. The language should be easy to comprehend and the use of jargon should be limited. As a content creator, you need to keep the reader experience and engagement in mind. This can affect your rank and position on search engines too.
5. Returning audience
Audience is important but returning audience is the backbone. If the rate of repeat visitors is high, you know that your audience finds value in the content you create. An easy way of measuring this is through comments left, any communication you receive on email and shares.
6. Content Sharing
Since we are living in the era of social media, it makes sense to track how many people are engaging with your creation whether video or article outside the webpage or website. It is a great way to monitor the performance of your content. So, make sure your social handles are embedded on your website.
7. Call to action
Call to action or CTAs must be tracked. Subscription, followership, likes and shares are very important to reach more people. A CTA can be a simple “subscribe to the website” or “follow the blog” and this ask from you can lead to you sharing free, exclusive content with your subscribers.
Easy ways to grow your email list.
The key to successful content marketing is to use data analytics to spot underperforming material and promote the high-performing pieces. Aside from that, multiple content formats enable you to achieve different goals at varying speeds and with varied efficiency. This should also be considered while evaluating content performance.
