MBA1345 Q&A Wednesday: Is my blog working? How do I know?

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Hey O welcome to the Hub $100 MBA show, the business podcast that packs a punch, a business knowledge punch that is every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Ryan and Ryan asks, is my blog working? How do I know? Such a good question and a timely question because I was working on some of this in our own business recently. In a nutshell, what Ryan is asking is that he's creating content, he's creating blog posts, he's publishing on his blog on a regular basis. But is it actually working? Is it resulting into customers? He hears content marketing works, he hears SEO is important and he sees he's getting new customers, but he doesn't know if those new customers are coming because of the blog or was it because of the marketing spend he, you know, just did with some Facebook ads? Or is it because of his outbound sales team how does he know if the blog is actually contributing to his success? And more importantly, if it is, what blog posts, what pieces of content are really doing well and really pushing the needle and adding revenue dollars, adding customers to the business? We get into all that, how to track this all, how to make sure we know what's working, how to or even if it's working or not, and then double downing on what works. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Ryan wants to know, is his blog working? Is it driving traffic, and most importantly, is it resulting in sales in customers? What Ryan is really asking is, how do I track attribution? And basically, attribution is exactly what it sounds like. How do I attribute credit for a sale? What was the buyer's journey? Where did the buyer come from? Did she come from an ad? Did she come from an affiliate? Did she come from reading a blog post and then opting into the newsletter? Did she come from a webinar? Did she come from listening to the podcast? Where did they come from? This is super important because in any business, it's important to know what's working and what's not. You have to be able to track it. I believe the godfather of marketing, Peter Drucker, once said, you can't manage what you can't measure. You really can't improve your business if you don't have a measurement tool. A lot of us, we just try things and hopefully we make some money. And we're not really worried about what worked and what didn't, as long as we got a win. No, we need to know what worked so we can double and triple down on that instead of spreading our efforts thin. It's good to experiment. But once we found out what works, and the only way to find out is if you measure it, then we double down on that. If we find that, hey, this last month, 40% of all my sales came from Facebook ads. Awesome. Let's triple down on that. Or 15% of all my sales came from one blog post. This one blog post is killing it. Promote that blog post. Run ads to that blog post. There's something about that blog post that's converting people to buyers. So how do you do this? How do you actually track all this? Well, you're going to use a tool. Big surprise, right? But what tool? Well, the funny thing is that I had this question myself because we were doing some changes to our website. I want to start attributing sales from the site to the app and all that kind of stuff. And I reached out to SEO expert Dev Basu and he gave me some really good tips. I want to credit him. Now, Dev says you have a couple options. If you have a powerful CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce or ActiveCampaign, they should have a tool called Attribution that allows you to track how did you get this customer. So check your email marketing provider first. See if they have a way to track attribution. You can email their support team or check their site or their help articles. And if they don't, don't worry. There is another option. But let me just explain really quickly how this would work if, like, say, for example, you're using Active Campaign. So basically, activecampaign has all your emails of all your people that have signed up for your newsletters, as well as the emails of your customers. So anytime somebody signs up to your product, your service becomes a customer. You dump them in a customer email list, right? Or you tag them in some sort sort of way. This is basically the end goal. When they're on this list or they're tagged as a customer, this means they're a customer, right? They mission accomplished. Now, we want to keep them a customer, obviously, but for the purpose of Attribution, this is the end goal. Now, the way they track all this is they give you some code that you would put in your header tags. This is very simple. It's a line of code or a couple lines of code. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can ask your web developer, whoever manages your site, I need this in my header tags. And of course, activecampaign, or whatever email marketing provider you're using that has Attribution, will give you instructions. So you paste this code on your site and basically it follows the journey of the actual customer. You'll know where it came from, you will know what pages it visited it, it will know where they opted in, maybe they opt in for a newsletter. And basically this allows them to track the journey of the customer and know, hey, this blog post is where they signed up for your newsletter. And from there they got some emails. And from those emails it became customers. So, you know, that blog post is the entry point. This blog post is baller. I gotta go really hard on promoting this blog post. You might find out that this blog post that you thought was epic results into zero customers in the last six months. You may want to remove that blog post and replace it with one that does work. And that's basically how attribution works. Now, if you don't have one of these email marketing providers that have this feature, you're using something simple or easy, no problems. You can use Google Analytics with Google Data Studio and it's the same thing. You're going to put some code up there. Now, I have to say this is a little bit more complex. It's not something you can't follow with some tutorials on YouTube or with Google Analytics documentation. It's definitely something you can hire for. You can get someone to upwork, hey, I need this all set up and they could do it for you for a few hundred dollars or so and it'll be well worth it and you're all set up. But the point here is, is that if you don't have a tool already that does this with your email marketing provider, no problem. You can use Google Analytics with Google Data Studio and that can be found@data studio.google.com now that you have the tool in place, your job is still not done. You or somebody on your team has to check periodically on how you're doing. You basically need a snapshot. You need a quick report, even if it's just a few lines, a paragraph that you put on Trello or any kind of note taking app, wherever you manage your notes. And every month you want to take a look, hey, this is what's happening. This is where most of our sales are coming from. This is where our signups are coming from. That way you know what to work on the coming month, you know what to focus on, you know what's working, you know what's not working. This will allow you to be a little bit more conscientious and focused with your marketing efforts. If you're testing Facebook ads, it's great to know if these ads are converting, but you also want to know, are they actually making people into customers? If you hired a writer for your blog, same thing, See if the blog post that they're writing is converting. Wondering if your podcast is actually driving traffic to your website and getting them to sign up for your newsletter or for your lead magnets. This is going to tell you. And if not, let's say, for example, it's not doing that well, maybe you need to prompt people in the podcast to say, hey, sign up for my newsletter. See if that works, change up the game, change what you're doing and see if you get a different result when you do the review the next month. Now, I'm saying month over month and that's the minimum. But you could do a review every week. You could do it every two weeks, especially if you're testing and tweaking and trying different marketing channels. It's essential for you to be tracking these things.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday, Ryan, it's a great question. You're wondering if your blog is working. What is working, what is not? You gotta be able to track attribution and this is how you do it. Use your already existing email marketing service if it has that option. This is probably the best option. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't know that ActiveCampaign had this option until I asked Dev and Dev told me, hey, Active does have it. So I was like, okay, cool. I looked it up. I found out this is how you do it. Great. Easy. I already have this tool. I'm just not using it. If you don't have it. You have a couple options. You can move to an email marketing provider that you like that has it, or you can use Google Analytics. Have a bit of learning curve with Google Analytics and Google Data Studio. You got to use them both or hire out for it and get somebody to set this up for you so you don't have to worry about it. It's all set up and you can just have reports and you could tell the person you hire, I need these types of reports every month. Set that up inside so that way I can take a look at them. Thanks so much Ryan for the question. For Q and A Wednesday, if you have a question that you Want answers for Email us over at Omar at 100- MBA-NET so I can answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you love this podcast, the best way to give back is to share the show. Share it on social. Share it with the person right next to you right now. Share. Share it with your colleagues on a lunch break. Share with your mom and dad. Thank you in advance for that. Before I go on to leave you with this, I know that it can get overwhelming with all the things you have to keep track of and follow up with and you know, look at and jot down and you know, make notes and make sure you iterate and improve. This may feel this way at the start. If you're doing all this tracking and you don't have somebody in each department right now, maybe you're still a small business, you haven't hired those positions yet. Totally fine. Reduce overwhelm by just plugging into your Google Calendar, whatever calendar you use. A time every month, a time every week, whenever the frequency is just 15 minutes with a task saying, hey, review my attribution. Find out what's working. Find out what's not working. Come up with an action plan for the month forward. Takes 15 minutes and it's easy if it's in the calendar and you're prompted. That way you're not overwhelmed. You know you're going to do it. You know it's there and it's going to be taken care of. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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