How to find how much your blog posts got shared

In our last issue of The Daily, I shared with you how to get ahold of two sets of data about your entire blog posts archives that you can use as you do a content audit. We talked about…

• Getting a spreadsheet of every blog post, including word count for each one.
• Getting spreadsheet of all of the basic traffic stats for each page of your site for the last 90 days (from Google Analytics).

But, there is more data to be had here in order to gain a full picture of what’s going on. So, let us continue a bit here…

First up, we also want to have a measure of how these blog posts are performing on social media. After all, if a blog post is getting shared a lot, you want to know that as part of your content audit.

One tool that can help you find out what’s going on is SharedCount. This tool will allow you to enter page URLs and get the number of Facebook shares and Pinterest pins for that post. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include Twitter retweets, but that’s no fault of the tool. Twitter just stopped reporting that data awhile ago.

Also nice is that SharedCount is free. Yes, it has premium levels of account which will give you access to much higher volume, including the ability to upload up to 500 URLs at a time for analysis. However, if you simply sign up for their free account, you can analyze up to 1,000 URLs per day. Just copy and paste URLs into the big textarea box there and you can analyze them. And I would think 1,000 URLs is plenty for our purposes. 🙂

Once you analyze your URLs, you’ll get a table of the Facebook share data and the Pinterest data for those URLs. And, yes, if you want to export them to a spreadsheet, just export to CSV.

Another metric that is good to look at is the number of backlinks to a blog post. Once you get into tools which deliver this kind of data, you often get into paid solutions.

One nice tool is the AHrefs Backlink Checker. You can plug a URL into this tool and get a simple backlink report. They are, of course, trying to sell you into the full version of their tool, but you could take their trial for $7 and gather a lot of data for your content audit. You could always then cancel your trial.

Alright…

So, at this point, let’s just back up here and look at the big picture.

What we’ve been doing so far is simply doing our best to capture the pertinent data about each one of our blog posts so that we can begin to analyze each one. We’re interested in…

• Post title and URL (obviously)
• Word count
• Page visits for the last 90 days
• Page bounce rate
• Average time on page
• Number of social shares (Facebook and Pinterest)
• Number of backlinks (if you can get the data and/or are willing to pay for it)

One other thing that would be important to look at is CONVERSIONS. Like, how well is this post converting to email subscribers? Whatever the call to action is, how well is it converting?

Thing is, whether you can get this data or not depends alot on how you’ve got your site set up. Plus, if you’re anything like me, you’ve got a lot of old posts where you basically had no call to action at all. 🙂 Doh! Well, that’s one of the things we want to fix as we do this content audit, but it is what it is.

If you are using a good opt-in plug-in such as Thrive Leads and you have it set up properly using different lead groups and shortcode forms, then you may be able to get a sense for the conversion rates on the opt-in forms. For instance, I have an opt-in form for my Niche Profits Finder lead magnet and it shows up on any blog post which talks about the topic of markets and niches. By looking at the conversion rate on that form, I can get a sense (generally) of how well those posts are converting.

If you can’t really get this conversion data right now, that’s fine. That’s something we will see about fixing as we do our content audit.

OK, my friends.

We’ll continue on the next issue. 🙂

– David