10 Simple Convertable Goals For Your Business Blog

Blogging October 19, 2010 2 Comments

If I am ever teaching people about business blogging and explaining the many positives that can come of it I always make sure that people have some clear goals in place. There is nothing wrong with blogging for pleasure and not having any goals but if you are spending some of your working day blogging you need to make sure it is paying off for you in terms of sales or business leads or traffic or whatever else your goals happen to be. I thought it would help If I used our blog here (80% of our new business leads from various countries come through the blog) to show you some of the goals that we had in place. It’s not good enough just having traffic either, there needs to be something tangible at the end of it all. Here are some of the areas that we focus on here on our own blog, they won’t work or be relevant to all of your businesses but you might be able to add a couple to your own business blog…

Goals In Reverse Order

10.Facebook Shares, Retweets, Digg, Stumbleupon etc

Funny that this one is the bottom of the list given that many would probably think it is the most important. You’ll see various sharing buttons all over the website to encourage users to spread the content to others. People use these quite a lot on this site but we don’t place that much importance on them as we know that many can just be automatic shares, or bots and they are just inflated numbers. What they can do though is expose the blog to a new audience who might just come along, read an article and describe to subscribe in one of the other ways provided.

9.Youtube Subscribers

Not that important for most people but we have some interesting ideas around our Youtube channel and always need as many subscribers as possible. A subscriber on Youtube is somebody who is opting in to get an email form you every single time you publish a new video and that is incredibly powerful because every time you publish a new video that is putting it in front of a tailor made audience who could pass it on to others if the content is good enough.

8.Facebook Likes

There seems to be a mad scramble on to acquire likes at the moment and it is understandable when you think of the future marketing potential that you have when somebody likes your brand. Not only is that appearing in their news feed and spreading the word to others but it also means that they are subscribing to your content for when you push it through the wall at a later date. Likes are hard to acquire but they provide you with a great captive audience and mean people can bond with your brand over time.

7.RSS Subscribers

I know that there are still millions of people who have no idea what RSS is and there is a certain chain of thought doing the rounds that RSS is becoming less relevant but in terms of subscribers to me it is the most important metric. An RSS reader is somebody who wants to get your content and not miss a single blog post, they are very very committed to your content unlike some other types of subscribers. I’ve seen a lot of research that shows that RSS subscribers are worth up to $8 per person.

6.Speaking Engagements

This is a bit of a long shot and not one that will apply to all blogs or businesses but we get about 2 or 3 speaking requests from people who have read this blog per month. When you speak at an event you are essentially being positioned as an expert in your given field (if you are or not is another debate) as well as being seen by a large audience. What this does is it lets even more people find your blog and you will find that business leads nearly always follow speaking at events.

5.Unique Visitors

Traffic doesn’t always equate to new business. I could probably get a million visitors to a Lady Gaga blog but I doubt I’d be able to generate any serious revenue from it. Traffic does help as you get bigger with some of the other areas on this list and you’ll find that as your blog or site scales it will actually become easier to grow. The links from other sites will start to flow, more people will bookmark your site and as more people read it more people again will start sharing the site and subscribing to it.

4.Ebook Downloads

When somebody downloads our E book there is a very good chance that they are interested in social media. There is also a very good chance that they own a business and might want to implement some social media that they learn form the E Book. They may also pass the E book to friends (who might need our services) or they might print a copy and leave it around the office. Either way having people engage with our content in the offline world is exactly what we want people to do and plenty of business leads have come via the E Book.

3.Ancillary Services

We run plenty of training days, conferences and engage in a number of other ways in the offline world. Having 120,000 people reading this blog every month gives us amazing access to a huge number of people who might be interested in some of those products or services. These additional products that we offer show that you don’t have to have flashy ads on your site to make money from your blog.

2.Business Emails

A fairly good barometer of the success of what we do here on the blog although the quality of emails we get is never going to be as good as the quality of actual calls we get. We often get very good business pleads in via email but you also get lots of people looking for free information (fair enough and we try to respond to as many as possible) or other forms of contact that are not related to a business lead.

1.Business Calls

This is the holy grail and probably the main reason for writing the blog. At the end of the day we run a business and if people are calling us looking for our services that means that we have achieved the main target that we set out to on our blog. You know when somebody calls you and asks about your services that is pretty much as serious as it gets in terms of a lead.

Set Your Own Goals

These goals might not be the ones that you should set for your blog but what is not in doubt is that you should have some sort of goal, it might be as simple as an email capture box. We know as a business that if we drive traffic to this blog then all of the goals above will start to get met. We know that increasing the numbers above always leads to more business either directly or indirectly over time so it’s a bit of a no brainer really. What are your business goals from your blog or do you not have any yet?

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