Welcome to the August Newsletter. What’s the point in blogging? No seriously, who reads your stuff? The answer should be your customers. We all have a website in order to sell our product or service, so we need to focus on our audience. I did an SEO course this week which blew my mind, it was like finding the 1000th piece of that baked beans jigsaw under the couch. I’ve gone back in to well-performing posts, made some really small changes and I’ve already seen traffic rocket. Better than that though, I have a new laser focus which has been informed by the stats on my website. I’m going to be so much more efficient now, and you know what, I’m going to make more money too. So it’s been a good week 😉 You know me, though, I’m all about the value add, so let me share some of my new knowledge:
1 – If you don’t have Google Analytics installed, get it. If you have it, pay attention to it.
2 – Accept that writing a great piece of content is only the first step – promoting it and tweaking it is just as important.
3 – Be really honest about why you have a website. What are your objectives? How will you achieve them?
4 – Decide on three things you want your visitors to do. For me, one of those goals was to read more than two pages.
5 – Use these goals to inform and guide your activity.
This is just the start, but it’s a really good start and you will see results. God I sound like a diet pills salesperson. Sorry about that.
CLIENT NEWS
One of the reasons I set up on my own was to work with people I admire on projects I believe in. Right now, my client Headtorch is absolutely ticking those boxes. The company provides eLearning to improve awareness and education around mental health in the workplace. Amy and Angus are brilliant to work with and their case studies just fill me with hope. As one said “it’s the final great hurdle in organisational culture” and the difference companies can make by being proactive is so far reaching. This past month has involved a lot of research and interviews – this video sums it up very nicely. WATCH IT
MAKING MY OWN IMPACT
Remember I mentioned going back into high-performing posts and tweaking them? Well, this was one of them – 9 things I love about Glasgow’s Buchanan Street. I wrote it in a bit of a rush, between meetings in my hometown. People responded to it better than expected, so I went back in to polish it. I then used it to catch the attention of an editor looking for similar articles. Finally, I delved into my analytics and realised the bounce rate was high, people were reading it and leaving, instead of staying and looking around my site. So I edited it a third time, adding more internal links, adjusting the structure and rewriting the metadata. It’s flying – and I wrote it at the beginning of June, so that’s three months of value. READ IT
It’s been a while since a post affected me as much as this one.
![August Newsletter]()
‘Sanctioned and homeless: one year and two weeks later‘ is an article written by a man as he gets his life back together and finally moves out of temporary accommodation into his own flat. It is beautifully written and uniquely raw, it really got me. Under the post was a banner asking for a £3 monthly direct debit to help the site, Commonspace, to operate. It’s a news service owned by a not-for-profit company called Common Weal, providing a platform for Scottish stories, free from the pressures of advertisers. How could I say no? I signed up. The business lesson here is to use powerful content to drive user action. 10/10 Commonspace.
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The post August Newsletter – Measuring results, mental health and a cone on your head appeared first on Impact Online.
