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With the large amount of content produced every day by photographers, it can be overwhelming to know how to produce content that will be seen. Additionally, it can be even more challenging to produce valuable content that can attract your ideal clients and help you book more weddings. Since you have more free time after outsourcing your images to a post wedding photography service, you can spend that extra time gathering information and writing your content!

So how do you know if you are creating successful content? Whether the content you produce is placed on your blog, social platforms, or in emails, you need to measure it’s results. By doing this, you can learn what your target market is interested in and what you should produce more of. Here are 4 tools you can use to measure your content’s success!

Blog Posts: Google Analytics

Blogging can be a great gateway for potential clients to get to know you and your brand. If you have worked to create a blogging schedule and are posting 1-2 times a week, you need to know which content readers are finding valuable. Google Analytics is a great (and free) resource for you to determine how well content on your blog is performing. Through Google Analytics, you can measure items such as page views, unique visitors, popular posts, and bounce rates. It can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start, so begin by looking at how many page views each blog posts is receiving. This will give you a good starting point to know which posts your audience is drawn to.

Related: How can you create a personal series on your blog that attracts ideal clients?

In addition to this, review how long visitors are on each page. If you notice that they are only on pages for a few seconds before leaving, they may not be reading your content. On the other hand, if they are on a page for 3 minutes, they likely read through your entire post. By analyzing this data, you can continue to produce more content that your viewers will engage with. In turn, you can also glean insights on the type of content that your followers may not find as interesting and consider a different way to present that content.

Tip: Create a spreadsheet each month of your blog metrics so you can see which posts are performing the best. This way, you can have a good overview of your content over a larger period of time to see what your viewers find most valuable.

WordPress Plug-In: Social Sharing Buttons

Social sharing buttons are additional tools that you can use to determine how interesting particular content is for your viewers. With WordPress Plug-Ins, there are several different sharing buttons you can customize and use to track how popular each piece of content is. Easy Social Share and Shareaholic both generate buttons and provide you with the necessary social metrics to measure which content is being shared.

Related: Reinvent your brand with inspiration from one of photography’s biggest influencers, Joe Buissink!

These buttons are designed to allow your followers to quickly and easily share your content on a variety of platforms, from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest. When you include social share icons in each post, you are able to see how many shares you received for each social platform. Along with this, these icons encourage sharing, because you can have it display the “share count” for each social platform. This way, viewers can see how many shares the post has received, and they can easily share it too.

Social Media: Facebook Insights

As you generate successful content, you need a way to share it, especially if it is located on your blog. This is where social media provides a valuable assist to the success of your content! Facebook is a popular platform to share content through, both for content related to images and text. You can use Facebook Insights to help measure the success of each post and learn which posts gained the most engagement. Through these insights, you can see several items about each post: the number of people it reached, how many people clicked on the link, and the total number of likes, comments, and shares on a post. When you boost a post or create an Ad, you can also use tools within Facebook Insights to measure the success of the content.

Related: If you’re not boosting posts in Facebook, you are missing out on potential clients

By measuring how well your content performs on social media, you can gain better insights on what content your targeted audience is interested in reading. The more Likes and Shares a particular piece of content generates, the more likely it can go viral. As a result, this leads to an increase in your followers, and potentially more clients!

Tip: Hootsuite or Buffer are additional tools you can use to measure the performance of your content across several platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!

Email: MailChimp

When measuring the success of your content, another area to review is your emails. Not only can you use emails to direct your clients and potential clients to a blog post or guide, but you can also share content that you specifically wrote for an email. With MailChimp, you are able to send emails to your clients (and prospective clients) and analyze the results. When measuring the effectiveness of your emails, there are a few areas to analyze, such as the number of people who opened your emails and how many people clicked on links within them.

By analyzing your open rate, you can learn which subject lines entice your readers enough to click through and read your email. This is important! Even if you have valuable content within the email, if your subject line does not catch their attention, your email may not be opened. Your click-through rate is also important, because this will tell you which content your clients are interested in reading more about. Use these metrics to help detemine the type of content to create, and which keywords to use in titles and subject lines.

Regardless of the tools you use to analyze your content’s success, in the end, your content should compel prospective clients to want to learn more about you (and eventually book you!). Just as you create a schedule for social media and blogging, set up time to analyze your content to see what is working and the areas to improve on. For more information on how to determine which content is valuable, download our Marketing Guide for Wedding Photographers!