Take the Long View and Track Your Authority

Episode #10 of the course How to quickly build your online authority by Vinay Koshy

 

The web is a powerful accelerator, and you don’t need to wait for decades to see the results of your work. However, you are not going to triple your audience in the next week or double revenues in a year without hard work and a smart strategy.

While you hope things will go according to plan, what if they don’t? What if the valuable blog posts, guest posts on major sites, and media mentions don’t get you the traction you want?

 

What to Do When Your Efforts Fail

In such instances, you can take steps to make your campaigns gain the traction you are after. A key part of this is being able to track the performance of your various activities.

Having clear goals for building your online authority needs to be complemented by KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. For example, if raising your social visibility is your objective, then you’ll need a KPI that indicates your social media growth. If sales are the objective, then a conversion KPI is required.

Your KPIs need to be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, Trackable) goals and in line with your overall online authority building efforts.

The key to having KPIs that will work for you is to have very specific, attainable, and results-oriented KPIs, such as: “Increase Instagram followers by 10% with 85% of the followers in our target age range.”

Your KPIs will, of course, need to be measured and tracked in order to determine success and in developing your strategy. You could check analytics around likes, shares, and comments, but these are basic ones. Other metrics you can track include:

• engagement per post

• conversions

• conversion per campaign

• return on investment per campaign

• social media mentions via Google Alerts

• links back to your content and site via a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush

• cost per impression

• cost per audience growth, etc.

• monitoring your Klout score

Most of these can be gained from Google Analytics. You can set KPI goals and track their progress there.

 

How to Diagnose the Issue

If you find that you aren’t getting the traction you want, then ask yourself:

• Is the content compelling and engaging for my desired audience?

• Am I seeking out my audience in the right places?

• Does my messaging resonate with my audience?

Building your online authority will require you to take the long view and tweak your efforts as you get the data from each of your campaigns. So, keep at it, making daily contributions to growing your authority. Tweak your approach as need be, and soon, you will be seen as a go-to authority.

In our final lesson, we look at how to nurture your authority and audience with automation.

We are nearly there!

Vinay.

 

Recommended book

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

 

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