Powering Content

Chapter 2. Setting Content Goals

Investing time and resources into content production without knowing why you are doing it puts you in danger of wasting time and coming away dissatisfied. So, I invite you to answer the following question: why are you investing so much in creating this immense catalog, in reaching out to people, in designing a message? What is it about content that draws your attention, and what are you trying to achieve with it? This answer is so crucial that I suggest making a note of it in the space that follows:

Traffic for traffic’s sake is vanity. Traffic to sustain an ad program, acquire new users, nurture leads, improve domain or page authority for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or generate signups? Now those are traffic-related goals I can stand behind. If we fail to articulate clearly why we are prioritizing traffic, our production process can lack clarity and direction.

After you learn about the hundreds of metrics available to track content success these days, you will quickly understand what you have gotten yourself into. You will soon be celebrating (and crying over) pageviews, and signups, and organic traffic, and time on site, and social shares—and, assuming your resources are limited, it will all make you feel absolutely confused.

On a tactical level, it can be difficult to prioritize both social content shares and organic search traffic. To focus on the first, you would need to concentrate on producing content that appeals ...