I have written thousands of blog articles in my career. I am by no means a professional or even close. But, if you write for a small blog, you need to be interesting, not professional. The other skill you need is analytics. If you can figure out which blog topics are popular, you are far ahead of the game. The next level of sophistication is figuring out which blog articles are popular on particular social networks and what tweet or post titles made them popular. Finally, you need to keep track of when a particular post’s popularity fades. There are many layers of sophistication in blogalytics, but they are not that hard to master. You just need to understand what is important to understand.
The rule of 1000 impressions
Some people feel that if you get retweeted on Twitter, then you are in good shape. Getting your content shared is helpful. However, the bottom line for me is if someone reads my article. A click is worth more than a retweet to me. Getting retweeted can help you grow your following on Twitter. But, a click helps to grow your blog following. Both analytics are important, but one seems more like a final result to me. The problem is that clicks on Twitter are not so easy to get. A click could be worth its weight in gold if it is from someone new who will become a regular follower. But, getting that click and figuring out where your best clicks come from involves some technique. If you post a blog entry on your Twitter account and nobody clicks on it, what did you learn? My best blog entries get clicked roughly once per 25,000 impressions. That means if your account has 6000 followers, and you post your blog entry four times during the day, and you get one click, you achieved something similar to my 1:25,000 impressions stat. I have another Twitter account with fewer followers which has a much better click ratio just because the followers are more engaged and much more connected to the industry I write about.
How do you establish a stat?
For each blog entry you write, you should have a “Twitter click stat.” You might need to publish each tweet multiple times to get an average. If you have 10,000 followers and publish each tweet ten times at intervals of twenty or more minutes apart, you will get a rate per 100,000. You might see that particular entries get five clicks per 100K while others don’t get clicked at all. If you waste every day of the week tweeting content that nobody wants to read, you are wasting your time. But, what if you spend your time identifying what they want to read and then post more of that, and write more of that. Then you are using your Twitter and blogging time more efficiently. You are finding winning ideas and you will win the game.