Why Readership Should be Every Website’s New Metric

Why Readership Should be Every Website’s New Metric:

Sarah’s recent post makes some great points about keeping the customer at the heart of the buying cycle content strategy. It also reinforces the point that content marketing is an ongoing process requiring customer engagement.

There is, of course, a huge difference between visiting customers and readers. Visitors stumble across a site, but are lightweight and typically don’t stay long and may not return. Readers are the ones to cultivate and track as they do participate and are far more likely to swing by again.

Readers are the guys who comment on your blog; they share posts and generally engage with your website. They convert; they are your life-blood.

Woo the flirts and cherish your readers

Flirting visitors and doting readers don’t always make themselves obvious straightaway, but you might encourage them to declare their intentions with a bit of loving – replying to every comment left on your blog for instance and reciprocating on their blogs too.

You might also publicise and share your intention to spread engaging fresh content over several days as part of a series. This might be daily comment from industry experts or the re-purposing of a white paper for instance.

Readers are more valuable than ever

With 75% of consumers searching online before making a purchase and nearly a quarter on UK internet time spent on blogs and social media, your website is working harder than ever to “earn” attention from readers and so developing and applying metrics to track them is definitely worth the effort.

Useful measurements

Blog popularity is a good starting point of course, but other metrics might include:

Levels of interest on specific pages (stickiness).

Subscriptions to emags added (and cancelled).

Sign-ups to white papers.

Tally of Tweets, Likes and Google + – and now pins – generated.

But of course it’s all down to generating and testing content, content, content. Bearing that in mind you might find these 5 tips on how to best display content on your website useful.