Grow your audience for seven weeks in a row. [5M 007]

Grow your audience the smart way don’t listen to a block head.

Welcome to The Monday Morning Momentum Marketing Manual #7.

Click here for last week’s report [5M 006].

 

 

“Most people complain about not seeing results but it’s only because they aren’t being consistent.”

 

This has been in my head ever since I published my interview with Adrienne Smith the founder of AdrienneSmith.net.

If you’re someone trying to grow your audience you need to know there is no ONE thing that you can do on any ONE day that will do the trick.

Success ain’t easy.

But who said climbing to the top would be?

This is why I admire the accomplishments of successful bloggers and I spend so much time researching what they do and talking to them.

 

 

I’m one of those types of people that until I climb the mountain you might catch me frequently showing up to look at and study the mountain.

I’m the type of person to plot out and plan my course BEFORE I leave.

I do this because it gives me confidence.  I want to know why I will NOT fail.

This is important.

 

After all this is why I started the 5M series.

I wanted to isolate the driving force behind the success of my blog so that I could better understand why people were visiting.

Over the last 7 weeks I’ve been using this information to tune my content marketing strategy:

• Content based analysis:  
  • Which pages are most popular?  
  • Which pages/topics get the most social shares and comments?
  • Which search terms brought the most quality visits?
• Referral based analysis:
  • Which sources of traffic are referring the highest quality visits?
  • Which new sources of traffic are appearing?
  • Where is it worth my time to promote?

If you want to grow your audience you must know the answers to these questions.

This is where I start each week.

 

5M Step #1 – Review Google Analytics Statistics:

What determines blog growth?

The 5M reports focus on the 7 most important performance metrics but which actually mean a blog is growing?

Seriously.

I’ve found it’s difficult to get a straight answer to this questions if you ask around, your answer depends on who you ask.

• Some people focus on the number of visits.
• Some people focus on the number of unique visits.
• Some people focused on the number of pageviews.

I look at it a little bit differently.

I look at the 7 most important metrics:

• If more are green than are red then I say that the blog is growing.
• If the current week had more days of more visitors than the previous week then I confirm the blog is growing. (see below.)

However, there are some cases when a blog is growing and only 3 of the 7 metrics are green so it can depend and there are always rare cases and exceptions to any rule.

 

Here are my results from last week:

The 7 metrics above are the most important for understanding your website health.

GREEN = GOOD

RED = BAD

 

How can you say a website is growing if it has fewer visitors?

In this case 4 of the 7 metrics are green and there were more days of more visitors in the current week than the previous week.

The current week had more visitors on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.

Monday seems like it’s a tie above but when I compare the Monday’s, 6 of the 7 metrics are green for the current week.

This tells me it’s not only what you do to grow your audience but when you do it that ALSO maters.

 

 

5M Step #2 – Take action to grow your audience by focusing on the 7 key metrics:

The good news:

• Pageviews:  Up 5.82% – This tells me that over all more pages were viewed this week than last week.
• Pages / Visit: Up 16.63% – This shows exponential growth from last week where I only had an increase of 1.12% in this category.
• Avg. Visit Duration: Up 20.53%  – After seeing my AVD increase by 52.84% last week I’m excited to see this continue to grow.  This means the audience is becoming increasingly more engaged with the content on the site.
• Bounce Rate: Down 3.93%  – This is another good indicator of quality content.  My bounce rate continues to improve after decreasing slightly last week.

 

The bad news: 

• Visits: down -9.27% – This means there were less visits this week than the previous week.  If one person visits the blog on two separate days then it would count as two visits.  This happened less this past week and this will need to be corrected asap.
  
• Unique Visitors: down -15.48% – This means fewer individuals visited the blog. Each visit from a unique ip address counts as one visit.  This will need to be corrected asap.
• % New Visits: down -10.45% – This means the percent of new visitors for this week is less than the previous week substantially. This is an indicator of an opportunities to improve promotion. 

Mar 10, 2013-Mar 16, 2013:

Here’s are my content marketing activities for the week:

Published articles:

• How I Increased web traffic for the 6th week in a row [5M 006]
  
• What I learned from Adrienne Smith – Q&A with the founder of AdrienneSmith.net
• What is the BEST SEO Plugin for WordPress? Seopressor vs Yoast Comparison
• Guest Posting vs Social Media which is best for traffic?
• The Google Reader Alternatives Roundup The Best RSS Apps
• UPDATED The International Blogger Championship Tournament page

Guest Posts Published:

• None.

Social Media:

• Google+:   I shared each post on Google plus on the main page and some in communities.
• Twitter: 5-8 shares per day. I Did SOME #Hashtag Hijacking mostly made announcements. 
• Facebook: 1 share per article published.
• StumbleUpon: I shared each article above.

Email Marketing:

• 1 Broadcast messages sent with Aweber.
• No Follow up messages sent.

 

 

Mar 3, 2013-Mar 9, 2013:

*Please check out last weeks episode for the activities completed during that period.

 

Is it possible to grow your audience seven weeks straight?

YES.

It starts with consistency like Adrienne said.

That was one of the goals that I made for myself when I started publishing 5M reports and so far it’s working.

In regards to having less visits and still considering my site as growing.

Think about the 80/20 rule.

Most business owners will tell you that they get 80% of their business from 20% of their customers.

Why do you think grocery stores spend so much time on loyalty rewards programs?

 

Currently my site is in the stage where I’m building a base with referral traffic.

Most people who visit my site arrive via a link from a blog post or social media.

The next step is to focus on search engine traffic.

I believe it’s a better strategy to prove your content with referral traffic first before you spend time and money trying to rank a page number one for a particular search term.

You need to know that people will actually read your content BEFORE they see it.

This is why I say you need to know why you won’t fail.

 

That my stats are showing more pageviews from my existing audience and longer time on each page means that my real audience is growing.

The number of people paying attention is increasing even if the total number of visitors didn’t.

This is what’s important.

 

Now it’s over to you.

How do you feel about my take on blog growth?

How did you grow your audience last week?

 

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