Let’s suppose you have hired a “rock star” content writer for your business website or your blog and you are really excited about your future prospects. You realize content matters and you take your content marketing efforts darn seriously. But you’re either not confident about your written skills, or you cannot persistently generate quality content for your website or your blog. So understandably, after lots of scrutiny you have decided to work with the content writer who sounds really promising and can actually deliver the message you want to deliver.
But how do you know if your content writer is really effective and helping you take your business forward and ultimately improving your bottom line? Frankly, gauging the efforts of a content writer is not as easy and tangible as evaluating your SEO efforts or click-through performances. Content writing is a process and it gradually takes effect and sometimes there aren’t even direct effects. You just know that something good is happening but you cannot really pinpoint what is the cause and since you recently hired a content writer so he or she must be the cause. Could be.
Gauging the effectiveness of your content writer
It is same as evaluating the performance of any other marketing and promotional activity. Before starting working with your content writer study your analytics. Take note of how your particular keywords and key expressions are performing and what is your conversion rate presently. Google Analytics allows you to study individual pages contentwise, hitwise and even conversionwise. Here are a few improvements you should notice if you have an effective and competent content writer working for you:
- Your search engine traffic increases after a couple of weeks of regular content posting
- Search engine traffic on important keywords and search expressions increases compared to the period prior to hiring the content writer
- In case of a blog there is increased engagement: people respond to your blog posts and express themselves
- Your content begins to go viral on content sharing websites
- In 3-4 months people begin regularly sharing your content through their social media profiles
- Your customers and clients are well-informed even before approaching you
- More people are doing business with you
These are some good benchmarks to know whether your content writer is effective for your business or not. This exercise may become difficult if you are running multiple promotional activities at the same time, but even then you can define parameters to track individual activities.