How to Measure the ROI of Your Content

I will admit, it was a long time into blogging before I even considered trying to measure the investments and impact of my content.

My first problem was that I didn’t see my blog as a business and didn’t see a blog as an online marketing strategy.

My first question, could you measure the return on investment (ROI) of your content?

One thing I know for sure is that blogging and creating content isn’t free. There are technical costs, labor costs and the headaches, oh the headaches.

Like me, many bloggers only consider the technology costs such as hosting and software but overlook the time and labor that go into creating the content. They also forget the time they put into promoting their content, which can be just as labor intensive.

When you add it all up, blogging represents a significant cost for any business. But, measuring the costs and benefits of your content can make it easier to justify the energy and expenses allocated.

The basic equation for measuring your return on investment is fairly simple:

(Return – Investment)
________________
Investment

ROI is typically specified as a percentage, so you can multiply your result by 100.

The real issue is that measuring your content creation efforts is not so simple because a lot of things can’t be measured and some things that go into maintaining a blog can get pretty complex.

The investment

The cost of creating and maintaining a blog fall into three categories: technology, labor and marketing. To get the sum of investment you need to figure out what you put into these efforts.

• Technology
  • Domain name
  • Hosting
  • Web Developer
  • Software (plugins etc.)
  • Email
  • Analytics

• Content creation
  • Creating the blog posts
  • Editing the content
  • Proofreading
  • Graphic design

• Promotion
  • Email lists
  • Social media
  • Lading pages
  • Offline marketing
  • Speak engagements
  • Guest blogging
  • Interviews

Now the hard part, figuring out what your investment in all that content has returned.

Every blog has a different roll within a company so measuring will differ between each type of blog.

Types of blogs:

• Direct revenue (advertising, affiliates and sponsorships)
• Business Owner (draw traffic to business website, product help & awareness)
• Professional Blogs (Blogging on an area of expertise to become and authority)
• Branding Blogs (blog for the sole purpose of branding within an industry)
• Product Promotion (promoting a products and services)

The return

Rule 1: You can’t measure if you don’t record.

Before we can even start to analyze the return on your blog content, we need to set up some way to measure the activity.

I suggest that everyone with a blog set up a Google analytics account. The information you gain here is instrumental in achieving to your goals.

Specific things to consider when measuring analytics:

• Traffic (total visits)
• Bounce Rate (do your readers stick around to read that content
• Page views (are your readers visiting and reading other content)

In addition to Google Analytics, you need to get familiar with the various social media platforms. Most of them offer a way of measuring your social engagement.

• Facebook Insights
• Twitter Analytics
• Pinterest Analytics
• LinkedIn Company Page Analytics

These tools can give you an idea of how your content is received on a social scale. Measuring things as simple as clicks on links, retweets, likes and favorites can go a long way of validating your efforts.

Finally, if you have an email opt-in list, measure how many people are opening the emails, following links and moving through the flow of your funnel.

Too many marketers would argue that this is not the best way to measure engagement but it still adds some insight into whether you are providing the right content to your readers.

When you put all of this together, we can get an idea if your content is performing the way you think it should. If you find that people are reading your content and they are taking action, this is an indication that your efforts are paying off.

Conclusion

This is just scraping the surface of measurability and tools to do the job. The fact is, it is difficult to measure content engagement but it gets easier when you define specific goals.

In the end, it all comes down to producing quality content. I have said it, it’s all over the web, and it will be the only thing that matters in the end. So, embrace it, invest in it and reap the rewards.

Do you measure the ROI of your content? Let us know what you think in the form below.

Creative commons image by Sean MacEntee