When I started the EntrepreneurOnFire blog back on June 3, 2013, I was determined to keep up with John’s rigorous podcasting schedule for a few reasons.
1. With a daily podcast, it only seemed natural to write a daily blog to be its companion.
I assumed that because our audience loves a daily podcast, that they would also love (and find value in) a daily blog.
2. I knew the more valuable content we could add to our website, the better our SEO would be.
Okay, maybe not so much a mistake… this is true, but they keyword here is *valuable* content.
3. With one of our top goals of 2013 being to increase our website traffic, I thought the more valuable content we had to offer on the site, the easier increasing our traffic would be.
Again, keyword here is *valuable* content.
4. I love to write, so why wouldn’t I write and publish a post every day?
There is a really good reason why not, and I’m going to get into that in just a minute…
But I also knew it was important to set a baseline metric, which I could keep going back to in order to gauge whether or not this rigorous posting schedule was doing what I wanted it to do.
So very early on I started looking for that baseline metric that I could always go back to in order to measure our progress in reaching our goals with the blog.
Here’s how I found that baseline
After checking out our website stats for the few months leading up to publishing the blog (overall unique visits), I thought maybe I’d use that metric as a baseline.
However, when I started to see that our overall website visits had way too many variables coming into play (the podcast, us being featured in iTunes, John being featured on Pat Flynn’s podcast, and so on), I realized that overall website visits weren’t going to be a fair judge.
So I started going into the page views for the blog itself vs. looking at overall site visits, thinking that would help me out more in determining just how well the blog was performing.
Thing is, until we did our site redesign in August, we had all posts running off our homepage – both podcast show notes posts and blog posts. So it wasn’t until August of 2013 that I could really start using our analytics to track the number of times someone visited the site and landed on (or went to) the blog.
Going through this exercise of trying to determine just what my baseline would be taught me something very important: while one of my overall goals with the blog was to help increase website traffic, (and therefore it seemed logical to use our website analytics to judge the blog’s effectiveness in helping us reach that goal), at the end of the day, page visits really weren’t – and still aren’t – the most important thing for me.
The most important thing for me was (and still is) providing the type of valuable content that attracts readers who care enough – who find enough value in the content – to actually interact and engage with it.
That was it.
I would use interaction and engagement on each post as my baseline, and that’s how I would determine whether or not the blog was doing what I wanted it to do.
But how do you measure interaction and engagement?
Well, I decided I would measure the interaction with a post by tracking the number of social shares it got, and I would measure the engagement on a post by tracking the number of comments it got.
Why having a baseline is so important
Here’s why having a baseline is so important: it has helped me determine the frequency of the blog over time, and it’s the reason why we’ve moved from publishing a daily blog, to now publishing only twice per week.
When I launched the blog, I ended up skipping every Sunday except for the first few, which pretty quickly moved us to a publishing schedule of 6-days a week for the months of June and July.
During this time, I started looking at patterns on each of the blog posts, and it turned out that in June and July, those patterns weren’t helping my baseline. I knew I had to give it some time, and I thought two months was a fair amount of time to look at.
Here are the patterns I was seeing during those two months:
- Very few comments
- Little to no social shares from the post itself
- Not much engagement on social posts that were promoting the content on the blog
I knew I had to switch something up.
So in August, 2013, I started publishing just 3-days a week on Monday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s, and almost immediately I started to notice something about those patterns in interaction and engagement:
When I was publishing the blog 6-days a week, I was publishing content that people simply didn’t have time to read. There was too much, too often, and I knew this because I was able to look to my baseline for proof.
Before I started the blog, I didn’t know that “too much, too often” was possible. I thought more content could only be a good thing.
But it turned out that when I gave myself more time to actually promote the content I was publishing, more people had the opportunity to come to my latest post and interact and engage. Instead of my posts being here one day, and replaced the next, they were beginning to reap the benefits of a longer lifespan.
So by promoting my most recent post over a couple of days, I was extending the life of the post as it existed in real-time, giving people more opportunities to see it on social media, visit the post and interact and engage.
I stuck to the 3-day-a-week schedule for August, September, October, and part of November.
It was great; I felt like 3 posts per week was a good rhythm.
But in late Nov 2013, I started publishing posts on only 2 days: first on Monday’s and Wednesday’s, and then on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s.
This was a testing phase for me – to see if the same thing that happened when I went from 6 to 3 would happen if I went from 3 to 2.
While my posts in the very beginning were seeing maybe 8-10 total shares, and an average of 2-3 comments (including my own responses), the posts I was publishing in November and December were seeing upwards of 50-60+ total shares, and an average of 20 – sometimes 30+ comments.
I found through my testing and tweaking that two posts per week did increase these numbers even more, because while we are a society of consumers, we’ve gotten to a point where there is simply too much information out there for us to consume.
What I’ve learned
Here’s what I’ve learned over the past several months after changing our blog publishing schedule, and why my original reasons for publishing a daily blog weren’t valid:
1. With a daily podcast, it only seemed natural to write a daily blog to be its companion. I assumed that because our audience loves a daily podcast, that they would also love (and find value in) a daily blog.
Turns out, a lot of Fire Nation listeners aren’t necessarily consumers of written content in the same way they are consumers of audio content.
I never really took the time to think that the reasons why we love doing a podcast so much (and why podcasts are so popular) is because you can listen to them when you’re driving, when you’re working out, or when you’re on a walk.
You can’t do the same with a blog, and therefore, it’s a lot harder to get people to come to your website, sit down for X amount of time, and read – let alone spend the time to interact and engage.
2. I knew the more valuable content we could add to our website, the better our SEO would be.
This is true, but something I also noticed about publishing a blog daily is that for me, sometimes my content would suffer as a result. I wasn’t crafting valuable content every time I sat down to write a post, and if it’s not going to be valuable, then what’s the point?
3. With a goal of increasing our website traffic, I thought the more valuable content we had to offer on the site, the easier increasing our traffic would be.
This may also be true, but I was probably giving myself a little too much credit here. Even with the blog, the vast majority of our website visits are to other pages on the site. So while the blog is helping, it’s not a significant piece of the pie in the grand scheme of increasing our website traffic.
4. I love to write, so why wouldn’t I write and publish a post every day?
I do love to write, and if the blog were my only focus here at EntrepreneurOnFire, then I would write every single day. But that’s not the reality.
Oftentimes I have people ask me, “What does a Content Creator and Community Manager do?”
Well, I do a lot of different things, but we’ll leave that for another post. Just to give you an idea, the blog probably only accounts for 15% of my time, which is why I don’t always get to write every day.
Be ready and willing to pivot
Sometimes we set goals or have specific reasons for doing things – and we might even go about finding baseline metrics to help us track them – but oftentimes what happens is we get caught up in the craziness that is running our own business.
Because it’s very important to me that the content I share on the blog is of value, I wasn’t going to let that happen.
By going back and really taking the time to review my goals and the reasons for publishing a daily blog in the first place, and then looking at my baseline metrics as they related to those goals and reasons, I was able to correct course. I wasn’t afraid to change up my publishing schedule because I saw that it was going to help provide more value to my readers.
Since changing it up, I’ve been able to increase the interaction and engagement on our blog in a major way, and that feels pretty awesome.
