Create great content by leveraging your analytics

It’s 5:02 a.m. on Friday as I am writing this. The dog is on the floor licking…something (he likes to lick a lot!) and my wife is asleep beside me in bed.

The last 10 minutes have gone something like this:
• What’s happening on Twitter? Boring.
• How about Facebook? Someone else got engaged. Yay for them.
• Any new emails? Delete. Delete. Inbox Zero!
• Hmm…

Source: blog.bufferapp.com

We’ve all been where Bryan Harris was when he wrote the above introduction to this post. As bloggers or content marketers, we always hear that voice in the back of our heads.

When are you going to just sit down and write that post? What are you even going to write about? How are you going to actually make an impact with the finished product?

Bryan’s post validates one of the core values of Lean Content Marketing: leveraging existing information and communities that you already have access to to enhance your content marketing efforts – in this case to find inspiration to create great content.

He goes on to describe his newfound writing process. He checks the analytics of his most recent tweets, finds the ones with the most clicks, then turns the central idea behind each one into a question that he can answer in the form of a blogpost.

Another method that Bryan mentions is checking Quora for someone already having asked the question you want to ask to get more insight into what knowledge you can provide. After all, one of the goals of content marketing is to teach your current and future clients the things that they want to know that you already do know.

Finding inspiration from content curation to create great content

One way to inspire content creation that I would add is to experiment with content curation. Curator Martin (Marty) Smith has been utilizing this method from day one. He created a process to inform his content creation that involves curating a post on a similar topic to his website’s content hub, checking the analytics of that post, and then deciding whether or not his audience has a high enough interest in that topic to write his own post about it.

With the new analytics on Scoop.it, you can generate reports involving metrics such as audience engagement, views, shares, time of day at which the most views were generated, and more. When a piece of curated content has a high success rate, perhaps it’s time to expand on that for your audience and provide the value that only you can provide by creating great content of your own expanding on the original piece or adding your own ideas and context.

Create great content by leveraging analytics: an example with Scoop.it Content Director

Here’s an example of how to do this with Scoop.it Content Director:

This is a screenshot of the analytics overview for one of the content hubs curated by the Scoop.it team. It’s clear that two of the posts resonated much more with our audience than the rest, so those two are the ones I would consider when trying to come up with a new idea for a piece of epic original content.

The information I can gather here is that my audience is interested in concrete ROI, as demonstrated by the 40% [open rate] in the one title, as well as unanswered questions about content curation in general.

Taking these subjects into consideration, here are just a few blog post ideas that I can come up with:

• Everything you need to know about content curation
• 5 most frequently asked questions about content curation
• How to double your content volume
• How to curate an engaging email newsletter
• Expert takes on the top content curation myths

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