This is the second monthly progress report on Project Dogfood, my project to build a targeted audience to this blog that will convert into potential leads for my project based services. To recap, Project Dogfood focuses on 4 areas for improvement – Targeting, Branding and Content, Social Media Tactics and Analytics. For the period March 16 – April 15, my successes focused on performing activities to establish the brand as well as continuing with my established social media tactics and analysing metrics. In this period I’ve seen an increase in the average weekly unique visitors from 8-10 to 20-25 a week.
Branding and Content
I recommend a number of activities to build your blog brand and focused my attention on completing them this month. For each to-do, I discuss the progress I made this month to illustrate by example. My measurements for brand awareness continue to increase, with the most pronounced increase being the number of twitter followers.
1. Define a name and tagline for the blog that reflects your business purpose.
I’ve branded the blog as DemandAccelerator – Weekly blog by Lori O’Grady for companies that use online/mobile technology to expand their business reach. I brainstormed for a noun-verb combination that meant that I will help people increase their business. Demand meaning business from both customers and sales. Accelerator being a verb that means increasing rapidly, as well as bringing to mind emerging companies improving their business processes and tools.
2. Own the name.
I’ve registered a domain name http://DomainAccelerator.com for the blog. Treating the blog as a product, I am registering it as a Trade name in my jurisdiction.
3. Define blog categories that reflect the products or services that your company delivers.
For me, my skills and competencies can be categories into technical implementation, social marketing, analytics and general business management skills. I reviewed the body of work to date and assigned posts into these categories, and made menu items to present the archived posts. For even more specific refinement, I use tags for the posts.
4. Setup a schedule to produce regular content for each category.
I recommend doing this so that you are able to plan and prepare posts in advance, and build up content balanced across the categories. Your schedule should be under constant review. Its important to be flexible, in the event that something important happens in your market that you want to blog about or you are inspired by a topic.
5. For retain personal brand, include information on the post Authors.
So as not to lose sight of the founding purpose of the blog as being a showcase for my skills and experience, the About page is about me, the author of the posts. I have also added my name in the tag line in the sidebar. Having removed my name from the blog name, I still have a branded presense on the blog.
6. Echo this presence across social media channels.
This month I have created Facebook and Google+ pages for the blog, also named DemandAccelerator. When I post to the blog, I post a status update to these pages.
7. Include a Call to Action
On the About page, I invite you to contact me in the event that your company can use my skills and experience. Secondary calls to action are the links to my social presense on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google, as well as invitations to share posts.
Social Media Tactics / Analytics
I am continuing to use Hootsuite to publish tweets and status updates to my Social networks, when create a post. As twitter is a rolling feed, I re-tweet about twitter and am experimenting with different days and time of day. I’ve added into my Analytics tracking on the above mentioned calls to action, as well as tracking when my blog is republished by other sources.
I’ve seen an increase in Blog unique Visitors and Views. Likes on Facebook and Follows on Google+, I include in the brand awareness metrics.
Twitter is still proving to be the best source as referrers tothe blog. I am also seeing traction from search engines, most notably Google search.
In Conclusion
Progress on the project has been positive. Establishin a brand and promoting the blog through social media channels has resulted in increases in all the metrics I am collecting. Please leave a comment to let me know if you find this helpful.
