[GROW-16] How to do an 80/20 Content Analysis

Blogging doesn’t have to be high maintenance.

It’s all about how you manage it. Traditionally, blogging is treated like an online journal and is looked at like a publisher. This means, you feel compelled to post quite often and this gives blogging the reputation of being very time consuming. Many businesses end up writing off the idea of blogging because they think it’ll take too much time.

But, blogging strategically is a different thing entirely…. and is the name of the game in terms of what I advocate here at the Blog Marketing Academy.

Strategic blogging isn’t about blogging by calendar. Instead, it is about treating each and every blog post as it’s own content marketing ASSET. And, like any asset, you optimize it for maximum ROI (return on investment). In this case, the ROI is about how well that blog post performs its marketing jobs of building your email list and growing your business.

Now, I’m a big advocate of the Redwood Strategy. I literally wrote the post about it. 🙂 The Redwood Strategy is the difference between blogging in first gear and blogging in fifth gear (metaphorically – obviously). It involves going back and doing periodic updates and optimization on past blog posts rather than constantly churning and burning new stuff.

But, how do you determine which posts to concentrate on?

We do it strategically, of course. 🙂 It’s how I roll.

Two things to keep in mind here to determine which posts to turn into Redwoods…

1. Decide which topics, for your niche, are the hot ones and plan out major redwood posts for them. For the Academy, this is why I have redwood posts on topics like SEO, monetization, list building, blog promotion, finding your niche, etc.
2. Do an 80/20 analysis on your archives.

You’ve likely heard of the 80/20 rule. If not, it basically says that 80% of your results come from about 20% of your efforts. In the case of our blog archives, this would mean that about 80% of our traffic and list building comes from about 20% of the posts we’ve written.

And, honestly, if your blog is anything like mine, it’s probably more like 95/5. Probably about 5% of my posts do most of the heavy lifting for me.

So, you want to determine what those are for YOUR blog. You do this with your traffic stats – likely Analytics.

Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Content.

Choose a 30-day timeframe (at least). Then, show enough data rows to account for a majority of your traffic. In the Page column, you will see the URLs on your site which get the most traffic.

THOSE are the ones you definitely want to go back and optimize. Do things like:

1. Insert a content upgrade.
2. Optimize for time on page and secondary clicks. (see my post on SEO)
3. Insert a tweetable or two to entice social sharing.
4. Add more to turn it into a true redwood post.

This is the perfect way to end off this series on LEVERAGE.

Because… what makes more sense?

Writing yet another ho-hum blog post from scratch, which is likely to head off into the archives? Or… make more out of what you’ve already written?

– David