Just before Christmas we launched the revamping of our blog(s). With a few weeks perspectives we draw the first conclusions and see what works and what doesn’t.
Increase in audience, increase in page views
The first striking improvement is that we experience a clear improvement of the audience. On average we’ve 25% more visitors than before Christmas.
The most dramatic improvement however regards the number of page views and the time spent on the website. When we compare the figures in week+1 (Monday of week “x” with Monday of week “x-1”) we observe that the number of pages viewed has increased 50%. At the same moment the time spent on the blog has also increased 2-fold (which indicates that people now read more than one post on average). In 2013 we had a visiting time corresponding to the reading of one post; now it’s more towards two posts.
Posts still not shared on social media
Despite all my attempts the big problem of our posts is that they don’t get shared. I’ve tried many things over time, the most efficient being posting the articles on Linkedin and Twitter with the right hashtags. It helped grow our twitter to ca. 200 followers. The key to engage more people and get more re-tweets / content sharing is certainly to follow ourselves more people and engage with them. The point is that nurturing the blogs is already taking a lot of time (if you have ever tried to produce quality content you know what I mean) and there is no time left for more “online social activities”.
I’ve known people over the years who had thousands of subscribers but their lives revolved around social media (twitting and posting on Facebook at all time of the day). I’m still wondering how they do to make a living or to work efficiently with all this time they spend on social media. It’s certainly a personal reward to have, say 5000 followers. But the question remains: what’s the ROI of it.
One last attempt to get more content-sharing
After reading many articles on reader content-sharing-behavior, I realized our sharing bar was not located at the best place (at the bottom of the article). There are convergent conclusions that placing the bar at the top of the article of having a floating scrollbar enables to get better results. A first step in getting better results is therefore to have a bar above the article. If it brings some improvements we’ll go one step further and turn the bar into a floating scroll bar.
Content in Dutch
Last but not least 2014 marks the debut of our Dutch-speaking version of the blog. Not only will be translate the weekly articles but we also started translating articles published in the past. They will be put online at a rate of 10 per weeks until the summer. At this point we’ll analyze again the results and decide on how to proceed.
Conclusion
This blog is the result of a perspective initiative that dates back to 2009. Its content is free to access, will remain free in the future, and it requires enormous amount of energy to feed. The best present you can make us is to share this content on your Twitter account, Linkedin profile or on your Facebook wall. Seeing the audience grow is our best reward.
Posted in Marketing.
