There are many “behind the scenes” style posts bloggers and content creators indulge in. They include: posting their strategy for social media and creation, posting results of their efforts, publishing reviews in the genre they create in, publishing fiction and short stories to their blogs, and posting a creation process behind their creations. This series seeks to explore the “pros” and “cons” of content. Today‘s topic includes posting strategy and results. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m in favor of all these style posts so these posts will take on a “just go for it” style tone.
The Concerns
-Someone might “steal” the technique and implement it better
-Someone might ridicule your performance or technique
-You may not achieve your goals and when you release a goal/schedule post, it allows others to see your failure/ accountability
-Some of these “metric disclosure” or “advice posts” are deceiving or skewed and creating your own might place you in a with a crowd less than honest or only trying to sell their online course/book on how to be awesome
-The “how to rock at x” post is very prevalent, if you don‘t have specific new information, it is hard to stand out or it may just feel you‘re looking for a massive following massive metrics bump while offering nothing substantial
-You might think you’re “too small," or “too new," to offer advice or to bother sharing your metrics. In the beginning, it’s embarrassing to be excited blog X is getting 18 page views a week. It becomes more embarrassing if you‘re trying all these things and don’t see more hits or more post interactions. If you’re not a person with “massive success” in a sea of people offering their “huge results” sometimes you ask “what am I doing wrong?” or “How could I have anything worth sharing?”
-Your metrics may not be impressive. While you might “trick” a viewer with a clean professionalism, strong writing, and spam comments that build up on blogs, showing them the hard numbers may tell the “true” story of how often folks visit a site.
-Your plan may change as you write and maybe continuing to either update an original post or create a post outlining these changes is draining.
-If you like linking to related content, and if you batch blog posts, going though and updating your posts with all the related links is VERY annoying
The Pros
-People love to see hard number results. Anyone can post “How to Have a Successful Blog” or “How to Gather a Social Media Presence” on their blog. There‘s so much generic copy and paste style blogs we tire of hearing the same advice. Show me the results! Prove your technique works!
-People love to know their time is invested wisely. So comparing the views I get off of Facebook vs Twitter is a wonderful way to show why investing in one site over another might be worthwhile. Also noting side benefits attracts audiences.
-People like to “be there from the beginning” and they like updates that show their time is spent well. The whole underdog story or starting with nothing to gain something is very appealing. These metric posts and plans posts let people have insight and connection to that arc
-Creating these blogs means you are checking your results often and performing an analysis on your results. This let‘s a person course correct as they go instead of giving up in frustration because they are “doing all the things” and seeing nothing from it. You can be more pro active in driving results
-Posting your intentions helps build personal accountability
-Posting and sticking to your schedule will help build discipline, consistency and a following
-Posting my metrics every week is a simple post that keeps my blog active. The format and phrasing is the same week to week so I/readers can use easy side-by-side comparison of each week‘s results. But this also means it takes precious little time to write.
The Outcome
For me the pros outweigh the concerns. I’ve never much cared what other people think of my progress. If I cared, I would have stopped writing long ago and gone off to do something “successful”, whatever that is. In Fairness, no one online has been mean or belittling over my progress or plans. I think the fear of mocking/failure/disappointment is low. When your numbers are low, there‘s no one to care and when they‘re high, they offer credibility and transparency.
Personally, I love metric and “how to” posts. Hard results give credibility and when I think “that sounds terrible” I can know what the overall “gain” would be. And I’m wondering “when/how” do I monetize or “how does this get me published” or “how does this get more eyes on my story and/or blog?” This metrics/plan style blog gives me new ideas to consider.
Talk to me! Do you use metric or “how to" style posts in your blogging? Do you like reading others’ blogs on this topic? Do you have a good tip for me about writing, networking, or some other related topic? Who is your favorite blogger and why?
