How to define your KPIs for targeted content writing?
KPIs stand for key performance indicators – they “indicate” whether your efforts are performing in the right direction or not.
Your biggest key performance indicator is the increase in your sales. But this KPI is made of scores of smaller KPI’s and this KPI cannot be attained unless you focus on numerous smaller KPIs.
Many content writing efforts do not pay off because people want to achieve everything with a single piece of content. They want to publish a few web pages or blog posts and then they want to generate business.
Surprisingly, every person who knows a thing or two about doing business knows the importance of lead nurturing – how you bring your prospective customer in your sales funnel and then, systematically, you lead him or her to the final act – purchasing.
But somehow, they tend to forget this when writing (or getting written) and publishing content on their websites.
When writing a particular web page, the focus should be on the immediate objective – what do you want to achieve by publishing this particular piece of content? What singular action do you want people to take after reading your web page?
Recently I published a book titled This Is How I Built My Content Writing Business; if I write about this book on my blog, do I just focus on prompting people to read the preview, purchase the book, or if they need to, they can also hire me as their content writer?
If I try to pack everything into a single blog post, it dilutes the focus and, even if the readers do not realize it, ends up confusing them. They may read the blog post, but a majority of them will leave without doing anything.
Continuing with the example of the book, if I decide to write a blog post on my book, what could be the key performance indicators?
- Purchase my book
- Read the preview
- Download a free copy
There can be many more KPIs, but let us focus on these three KPIs.
I should not try to club all these three KPIs in a single blog post.
If I want to encourage people to read the preview, I should just talk about the benefits of reading the preview. I should talk about what the preview contains and how they are going to benefit after reading the preview.
Read the preview of my book
When I am trying to convince people into reading the preview, I do not need to pressurize them into considering the option of buying it. If they want to buy it, they are going to buy it and I do not need to tell them. There is a “Buy” link on the preview page.
Therefore, if my KPI is getting the maximum number of people to read the preview, I must focus on that.
Similarly, if I want the maximum number of people to buy my book, I need to write in such a manner that I convince them into buying. I shouldn’t mention the fact that they can also read the preview.
Top image source: Shopify