Sitting in front of your Google Analytics dashboard is probably not your idea of a good time. But with a little help from your data, you can stop blindly publishing content and start making informed decisions about what content you need to share with your audience. I promise you’ll save SO much time and frustration.
In today’s episode, I’m chatting with Jennifer Grayeb, CEO of The Nimble Co. about data—data to help drive what content you’re creating, the data you should be paying attention to, and data you can let go of.
And, of course, Jennifer is one of the speakers at The Content Experiment Summit starting March 15, 2021! You can sign up right now at The Content Experiment Summit. If you’re listening in real-time, registration is open NOW and we get started in just a few days!
Mentioned in This Episode
- The Traffic Insights Dashboard
- Demystifying Search Engine Optimization with Meg Clarke
- The Content Experiment Summit
About Jennifer Grayeb
Jennifer Grayeb is the CEO of The Nimble Co., a consulting group focused on helping online business owners better understand their numbers so they can make data-driven and profit-generating marketing decisions. She recently left her senior strategy role at a Fortune 5 company where she had 6 roles in just 7 years. While in that role, in just 2 years she built a productivity blog that reached over 2 million page views per year, which she went on to sell.
In every role she’s had or every company she’s owned, one thing has been consistent: she delivers results without working 80 hour weeks. Now she helps others do the same with one of her best-kept secrets – data.
You can stay up to date with Jennifer on her website or by following her on Instagram and Facebook.
Transcription
Abby Herman
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 108 of the content experiment podcast, a podcast that supports the idea that content and marketing are ever moving targets in any business. And it’s okay if you don’t feel like you’re doing it all right all of the time; you have permission to experiment with little tweaks and changes in your content to find out what works for you, what increases value for your audience, and what grows your business, and most importantly, what feels good for you.
I’m Abby Herman, content strategist and coach for online business owners who are ready to make a bigger impact online. I firmly believe that success isn’t about what big marketing brands and so called gurus think is the right thing. It’s about you and your business, your lifestyle, and frankly, your values and belief systems. You get to do business in a way that works for you. If you’re new to the podcast, I’m so glad you’re here.
I work really hard to bring you informative and to the point content because let’s face it, no one has time for fluff. If you like what you hear, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss another episode. If you’ve been around a while, welcome back! Have you left a rating or review yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Leaving a rating and review helps Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and all the other platforms – and me – know that you like what you’re hearing. And it helps to get the podcast in more earbuds and who doesn’t want that? I know I do.
On today’s episode, I am chatting with Jennifer Grayeb about data – using data to help drive what content you’re creating. Jennifer is going to walk us through what we should be paying attention to and what we can let go of, so you can save yourself some time and frustration. And of course, Jennifer is one of the speakers at The Content Experiment Summit in March 2021, talking all about using numbers to drive what content you’re creating.
Let me tell you a little bit about the summit before we get into Jennifer’s interview. The summit is for coaches on course creators and features 25 speakers who are sharing bite-sized tips and tricks on how to get a better ROI on their time and financial investments in content and marketing. This summit is for you if you’re trying to publish in all of the places and are burned out; if you’re chasing down content ideas with no rhyme or reason to how you’re organizing it; if you think that “everyone” says video is where it’s at, but you’re feeling really panicked when you think about it; and it’s for you if you just don’t know what to create.
We are going to help you out; we’ve got you covered in The Content Experiment Summit. The free summit features speakers on topics like: selling with affiliates, serving your audience, honing your messaging, using podcasts to grow your business, content accessibility, online events, staying profitable even during a pivot, automation strategy, and so much more. And a lot of the speakers are people who you may not have heard from over and over and over again. I’m hoping to introduce you to new powerhouses that give you permission to do things just a little bit different. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know, it’s important to me to do things a little bit differently. Sign up right now at thecontentexperiment.com/summit If you’re listening in real time, registration is open now, and you’re running out of time because we get started on March 15 – that’s next week, just a few days away.
Wondering who the speakers will be? Well, everyone who has been on the podcast since the first of this year is on the speaker lineup, along with today’s guest, Jennifer Grayeb. In our conversation, Jennifer and I chat about the most important data to pay attention to (because you can’t possibly take it all in), what to do with that information and how often, and so much more.
Now, let me tell you more about Jennifer so we can get on to the interview: Jennifer Grayeb is the CEO of The Nimble Co, a consulting group focused on helping online business owners better understand their numbers so they can make data-driven and profit-generating marketing decisions. She recently left her Senior Strategy role at a Fortune-5 company where she had six roles in just seven years. Well in that last role, in just two years, she built a productivity blog that reached over 2 million pageviews per year and she went on to sell that blog. In every role she’s had or every company she’s owned, the one thing that’s been consistent is that she delivers results without working 80-hour weeks. Now she helps others do the same with one of her best-kept secrets: data. Without further ado, let’s hear from Jennifer.
Hi, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jennifer Grayeb
Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Abby Herman
I am excited to chat. And we just had like our own little chat before we hit record, catching up and talking about all the things, so I’m excited to dig in and to hear more from you about tracking our numbers, especially as they relate to content and what we should be tracking and all of that. But before we do that, could you share, in your own words, what you do and who you do it for?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, absolutely. So I run a company called The Nimble Co, and we specialize in sales and marketing analytics to help online business owners really understand which of their marketing activities are actually resulting in leads and sales, so they can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. And now, we actually also teach other service providers how to do this, as well. So that’s kind of been something new for us, but we’re really enjoying that piece of it, too.
Abby Herman
Awesome. So your business is primarily a product-based, digital product-based business? Or do you work one-on-one with clients, as well?
Jennifer Grayeb
So it’s both: we do work one-on-one; I would say the one-on-one actually is a larger percentage of our overall revenue at this point. But digital products are starting to kind of ramp up to be a little bit more of an equal contender. So I imagined by the end of this year, it’ll probably be 50/50 between the two. But we do work one-on-one with clients, typically not in a retainer format. So we usually come in on a project basis, work, wrap the project, and then exit.
Abby Herman
Awesome. And how does the way you work with clients and the way you run your business, how does that help you to live the lifestyle that you want?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, this is such a good question, because when I started in this online space, like this time around (because I’ve kind of been in and out of this space for a long time), but when I left corporate in, goodness, 2019 now (I keep saying last year like 2020 never happened), but in 2019 when I left corporate, I had left quickly stepping into a fractional COO or DOO-type role – so I was running operations for five to six different businesses; and I was exhausted, like I left the burnout of corporate only to kind of come into entrepreneurship and like re-burnout. And so what I found was, I just really didn’t like the retainer model, because I like to go really deep, if I’m gonna do something, and having five to six clients, like I couldn’t really go really deep in one because I had to stretch myself across all of them. And so I ended up kind of finding measurement through that operations work. And I’ve built this business around this model of project-based work, where I do have one or two clients that are on retainer, but because there’s only a few of those, I can go really deep there. And then all of my other work is project, right? So I can kind of set it to be like: this is when we start, this is when we end, there’s not that continuation. So I feel like I can really control my schedule a little bit more than when my entire business was retainer-based and I felt like I didn’t have that level of control.
Abby Herman
Yeah, I agree. Totally. I can totally see that. So let’s talk a little bit about the numbers. I think it’s one of a lot of people’s least-favorite things to talk about and to do. And so you work with clients to analyze the data in their businesses. And I specifically want to talk about the data related to content.
Can you talk about, and I feel like what you and I do is really complimentary: so I work with clients to create the content strategy and figure out, you know, what to put out there, what kind of blogs to publish, what kind of podcast episodes to put out there, what to put on YouTube, social media, all of that; and then you look at the other side. So once it’s already out there, you look at the result of that, how the numbers, you know – was the marketing effective? Can you talk a little bit about what we should be paying attention to?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you could probably even pull some of this into your side as well, in terms of the planning, because I think that can be really helpful, so I’ll touch on that a little bit, too. But I mean, for content, I think what’s most important, at least in my opinion, to look at first, is how many users are actually looking at each of those pages. And when I say pages, you know, blog posts, for example, content pieces, whatever you want to call it, I’m going to use the word pages just to keep it easy. But how many people, right, the users, are actually looking at the work that you’re producing? And that’s really going to help you understand which pieces of content are attracting people or catching their attention.
I have a great example here: so I worked with a professional blogger, and we looked at her top pages on her site (which were blog posts) over a period of 12 months. And so we looked at the top 10, and we found that four of the top blog posts that she had in an entire year were focused on parenting teenagers. And those happened to be the only four posts she had on that topic. So what was fascinating was it was like, if the only four you have on this topic are 40% of your top content, like, we need to be creating more on this, right, because if this is attracting this many people, imagine how much more we could be capturing in like that market if you had content. And then taking it even a step farther, she had no monetization on those four posts outside of ads, because she was a professional blogger. Like she didn’t have any digital products about raising teenagers, she didn’t have any like physical products that she could recommend as like an affiliate for raising teenagers. So we also found that it was a great opportunity for her to like, one: start thinking okay, in the next year, I want to create a product, like a digital product of course, around raising teenagers; but two: in the interim, what can we be doing to monetize this content? Because we’re already getting so many eyeballs on it, like is there somebody else out there that has an amazing course on raising teenagers that we can affiliate for and promote? So not only were we able to then adapt her content strategy, but we were also able to figure out: how can we make more off of the content that she already has that’s working for her?
Abby Herman
So it really informs the products and services that you’re going to offer, the other content that you’re putting out there. So you talked about pages, looking at the pages and how many people are coming to each of the pages. Are there other things that we should be looking at when it comes to the content that we’re putting out there?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, the only other one that I would mention is just because I don’t like to overwhelm people with numbers, because I think these two together will make the biggest difference up front. The other one I would look at is time-on-page. Because there’s two things that you can see here that could be a problem: if somebody comes to a 12,000-word blog post and your average duration is like 15 seconds, you know unless you somehow only attract speed readers, I think we can safely assume they’re not reading a 12,000-word, or 1200-word (or whatever) blog post in 15 seconds, right? And so I would be thinking about one: is there a misalignment in your marketing to your content, right? Like, you know, not to say that means your clickbait-y at all. But sometimes people, they try so hard to be a good marketer, that they’re almost twisting what they’re saying so much that it doesn’t actually align with what people hit when they get that page. So one: making sure there’s alignment between your marketing, messaging, and your actual content. And then two: is there any opportunity to make tweaks, right? And this is where, you know, great copywriters can be fantastic. Because it’s like, maybe we need to try a different headline, maybe we need to try a different like hook statement, maybe we need a different image at the top, right? And so that’s when you can start to tweak some on-page things to see if you can increase that number. Because you know, you want to have a number that’s high enough that assumes most people are actually reading the content.
Abby Herman
Yes. So how does what you do and what you’ve been talking about, so you talked about time-on-page, looking at how many people are going to the page; how does that relate to search engine optimization? Because you haven’t mentioned that yet; you haven’t used those words yet, but it sounds really familiar.
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, I mean like, time-on-page definitely impacts SEO, right? Like you know that. I typically am not thinking about content strictly through that lens, just because like, you know when I worked with professional bloggers, SEO was everything right? With a lot of the other business owners I work with, it’s kind of like a nice-to-have for them; they’re not actively thinking about it, right, wrong or otherwise, right? Because I do feel pretty strongly about SEO and I know a lot about SEO. But I find that a lot of the business owners I work with, they’re just not prioritizing that right now. But it just so happens that yes, like those two things, the number of views to a page and how long people stay, will positively or negatively impact that SEO. So I think with that, that could be a good reason to look at if your content is getting a lot of traffic from organic Google search (or Bing or Yahoo or wherever people search nowadays) and that time-on-pages is low, that is a great indication that your meta description there might not be in alignment with what your content actually is.
Abby Herman
Okay. So you kind of help identify the numbers that we’re looking at, kind of help to identify that to allow people to make those changes with their SEO in their meta descriptions, their keywords, and all of that. Okay, interesting.
Jennifer Grayeb
Exactly. I mean, I typically find if you write a really (and I’m sure you see this too) like if you have a really good piece of content that’s well-written, that captures a reader’s attention, and that is really speaking to that ideal person, it’s going to work on paid media, it’s going to work on organic media, it’s going to work on social media, right? So yes, there may be tweaks on each of those things, but I think sometimes we get so focused on all the rules, right? Like, this is what it has to be for this platform, or this is what it has to be for SEO, that we just forget that like, if it’s just a good piece of content written to the right person, like, you know, it will be effective. And there might just be some tweaks and optimizations you can make that’ll help those different platforms. But ultimately, when you have someone that does what you do, or anybody listening that writes content that knows what they’re doing, like, that content will perform; it’s just a matter of, you know, making tweaks to make sure you’re getting in front of the right people so that they have the opportunity to consume it.
Abby Herman
Yes. Okay. So we want to look at our numbers. We know kind of what to pay attention to. How do we find these numbers? And I know that you have products that are available; I own some of them. How do we track these numbers? Can you share a little bit about what that looks like and how we can make it really easy? Because I know that digging into Google Analytics, and Search Console, and all of that can be overwhelming for a lot of people.
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah!
Abby Herman
Yeah, to say the least.
Jennifer Grayeb
I was just gonna say that. Yeah, and even more so now. So at the time that we’re recording this, which is February of 2021 (and I have to timestamp it, because, you know, Google just released Google Analytics 4, and so now there’s all of this extra complexity, kind of in the analytics market space, so to speak, because you have what we all know of as Google Analytics today, which is really Universal Analytics; and now there’s Google Analytics 4 and so far a little more complicated), and to make matters worse, the language that they’re using on G4 is really confusing because it makes people think that it’s time to just switch over. And the truth is, Google Analytics 4 is not fully ready yet. So they’re still developing that product every single day. So what most measurement experts will tell you is you should just have both installed on your website.
So don’t go to your Google Analytics today and think, oh, cool, I need to do this upgrade. No, you want to add Google Analytics 4 almost as if you have a different Google Analytics account and you’re having both on your site. There’s no negative impact to doing this, and basically what you’re doing is you’re feeding Google Analytics 4 your data, because Google Analytics 4 is going to be super smart, right? It’s like predictive analytics, it’s like machine learning, it’s like some crazy, you know, robotic kind of stuff. So you want to be feeding that the data. But the problem is the reports are just not there yet. So if you were to go and try to look at the reports in Google Analytics 4, it’s wildly confusing. So anyway, that’s just my little aside for people. When I talk about where to find things, I’m talking about Universal Analytics, which is like the standard Google Analytics that you likely already have in use.
So I’m going to tell you, I do have some products, which I can mention. But first, I want to tell you just the backend free way to find this information in Google Analytics. So what you’re going to do is go into Behavior. So on the left hand side of the screen, there’s a section called Behavior, you’re going to click on that, then you’re going to click on Site Content, and then you’re going to click on All Pages. When you land on that report, that is your All Pages Report, it’s going to show you in order of traffic, your most visited pages on your site to your least visited. There will be things in there that are not blog posts, for example, your homepage will be listed, your services page or about page, you know, etc. But you can go through and that’s where you’ll start to see all of the blog posts. You’ll see things like paid page views, sessions, users. I typically look at users because that’s like people, right? And my goal is people, so I look at people. And then, you’ll also actually see time on the page right on that report as well. So you don’t need to go hunting, there’s other metrics there. But those are the two big ones that I would look at, are users and time-on-page.
Abby Herman
Okay. And what about when it comes to social media? So we’re creating these blog posts or videos or whatever, we’re sharing them on social media to, you know, in order to promote them, to get people to go to the pages, we’re putting them in our emails. Are there other ways that you have to track those metrics as well?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, so for that, what I would be looking at is, it’s called your Source Medium Report, and that’s under Acquisition (I want to say it’s like acquisition, I have to I’ll send you the directions you can put in the show notes) – Distract myself with like mentally going through Google Analytics in my head. But it’s called the Source Medium Report that will tell you your sources of traffic. Like if it’s Facebook, if it’s organic, if it’s Instagram, if it’s Pinterest, whatever. I do have a tool called The Traffic Insights Dashboard, it’s only $47, And they’ve actually pulled everything for you directly from Google Analytics so that you don’t have to go back there. And so we have a page for General Traffic Overview that tells you where all your traffic’s coming from by those sources (that you don’t have to go hunting for it). I’m also really big on having contacts; I think a number, on its own, is pretty meaningless, right? Like if you had fourteen to your website, like, that’s great if last month you had one, but if last month you had a hundred, fourteen is awful, right?
So you need that comparison or that percent change to understand to actually have context. So my dashboards that I build all include that so that it makes it easy for you to see. And you don’t have to like, go back and try to like math your way through what is going on in your content. And then there is a page for SEO so you can see which keywords are bringing people to your website. And then we also do a content drill down so that you can see that content page, right on the dashboard. So that’s the Traffic Insights Dashboard. Again, you can find all these things for free in Google Analytics; it’s just the benefit of the dashboard is to not have to deal with going back there and getting lost in the reporting. We kind of just synthesize it all and make it really easy for you to consume.
Abby Herman
Yes. Okay, so as we’re looking at our numbers and we’re seeing that maybe they’re not exactly what we want them to be, how do we know what changes we should be making to our content so that it lands better with our audience? We talked a little bit about this already but I’d like to talk about it again, and kind of go a little bit deeper.
Jennifer Grayeb
No, absolutely. And I have other examples, too. So it’s such a good question. So it really depends on your goal, right? Like everything that you’re doing with content, or really anything in your business and marketing should come back to: what is my goal here? And here’s the example I’ll give you: a couple years ago, I ran a really big productivity blog. And I loved writing about organizing, like, I loved making cute little organizing solutions in my office and taking pictures of them, posting them online. And when I would go and look at my numbers (for like, once a month, I would go do a review to see how things were going), and the posts that I did on bullet journaling, which is like a type of planning, were exponentially higher than the posts I did on organizing. So while I loved organizing, right? And I love doing those posts, and they were fun to write for me and I enjoyed it; any content I did on bullet journaling not only attracted more people, but like it would keep them on my website, they would click on more things, they would take all these actions. And so I really had to ask myself, what’s my goal here, right? Is my goal to like, have this website that I can write really like fun content for me that’s fulfilling? Or is my goal to drive traffic?
Because I was, you know, at the time, this was a kind of professional blogger situation where I was, you know, I just had ad income, I had product sales, I had all these things tied to it. And so it was hard, right? Because you’re like, on one hand, I want to enjoy what I’m doing. But on the other hand, like, what is my goal, and if my goal isn’t to build a business that I love doing what I’m doing, my goal is to get traffic so I can make money so I can ultimately sell this business – That’s what I had to do, right? And so I really, not to say I never wrote organizing content again, but it was like, okay, when we did our content plan, we really had to prioritize things that we knew would drive more traffic, because my goal was traffic. So I hope that example makes sense.
But to me, it really comes down to like, what is your goal, because some people are like, no, if I don’t love writing about that, I don’t want to write about it, and I’m not going to do it. And that’s fine. Like, I’m not telling people to do like, I’m not telling you to do what you don’t want to do. It’s just, you need to be aware that what you’re doing, if it aligns with your goal, or if it doesn’t. And so, if I had stuck with organizing, for example, doesn’t mean I could never have met my goal. But I would have just had to be honest with myself that it was going to take longer, or I was going to have to try like different things in my marketing, right to find those people because the people I was finding wanted bullet journaling. So that’s kind of the the best example I can give is just making sure it’s in alignment with your goal.
Abby Herman
So a lot of the people that I work with a lot of people who are listening have a product or service, a digital product or service that they are offering. So if they want to drive traffic to a specific product or service, or they are getting ready to launch that thing, that product or service, what should they be looking at within their analytics, you know, within their numbers within their data, what should they be looking at to make sure that they are attracting the right people to them?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, so I think one: it’s like, if we go back to that parenting example, you know, if let’s say she was going to launch a product about, I don’t know, potty training, and 40% of her audience has teenagers, like, does that make sense? And for her, it actually would have because the other 60 – it was a weird mix for her. It was like 40% of people had teenagers, and like 60% of people had like toddlers. So she had this like weird kind of mix that we had to you know, work our content strategy around. So I think it like it really depends.
I mean, for me personally, what I would do when I have a new product coming out, I or if I’m working with a client, like I would go through the content and see one: are we attracting people who we think, based on their other interests, based on how they’re engaging with our website, would like this product? And then two: if those things are all getting traffic, like when I work – and I keep using blogger examples just because they’re so high traffic it’s the easiest example. But like with a blogger, when they would have a new product, we would literally go and say, Okay, let’s say she came out with this raising a teenager course, we would go and find all of the content she had on raising teenagers. And like, embed that into that, so that every single piece of content has an opt-in or a plug for that product. And there are ways that you can do this that doesn’t involve you having to go update every blog post, you know, every time a new product comes out, there’s like short codes, there are, I know, like Thrive Leads is one that I think can auto-embed things. There’s all kinds of fancy plugins you can use nowadays to like, have it say if it’s this category, plug this product, or whatever. But that’s what I personally would do.
And like, if, for example, if I were like, going back to the the organizing content, like if I had been thinking about creating a course on organizing and I went in to those analytics, I would’ve have known that that probably wasn’t the right time to do it because my people were interested in bullet journaling. And so , you know, not to say you can’t launch the course, but it’s around, okay, well, if I’m going to do this, how am I also now I’m going to go out to my marketing strategy and change what I’m doing? Because what I’m currently doing is attracting A, right? And what I am going to need to attract is B. And so I think a lot of it’s just being really honest with ourselves, I think people tend to just look at the traffic number across the board. And they’re like, Oh, well, everybody says, you know, you get a 2% conversion rate, and I have this number of traffic. So I’m gonna make this much money. And you’re like uh, I mean, like there are industry benchmark conversion rates. But like, if you have the wrong audience, that’s not going to work, right? If you have all men and you’re selling like a feminine product, you know, that’s not going to, like that’s just not going to convert. It doesn’t work like that.
Abby Herman
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So when we’re looking at our numbers, we’re going in to make changes to our content, and maybe the way we’re presenting it and all of that, how much change is too much change? And I’m asking this because you’re a speaker at The Content Experiment Summit and the whole point of The Content Experiment Summit is to experiment with things. And I feel like there’s so much pressure out there for people to just overhaul what they’re doing. They see, oh, there’s this new way of doing things. I’m just going to change everything. And the reality is that, you know, either it doesn’t ever get done, like you’re never finished, or you feel really crappy about the way that overhaul went, because you were rushing, because you tried to do too much. So can you talk a little bit about what it could or should look like/feel like when you are making changes to your content? And how much is too much?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, such a good question and you’re so right with what you just shared. I mean, so personally, and I can only speak from, you know, personally and what I advise my clients: only really look at it monthly. And I think that surprises people, because they assume that like I’m some big geek that just sits here all day, like watching every page view come through. But like you said, it’d be too easy for me to quickly jump, right, and act on every little indicator that I see.
So here’s an example: Let’s say I had a 10,000 person email list, which I don’t, but let’s pretend you know, let’s pretend it’s a world in which I do. And I send an email out with a survey and I say, do you guys like my email list? And the first person responds yes. And I’m all excited, right? And then the second person responds no. Now I’ve only had two responses, so is it fair for me to say that 50% of my email list doesn’t like my content? Well, no, because I don’t have a big enough data set to say that two people out of 10,000 are representative of that entire audience, right?
And so your data is kind of the same way, like you need to give it time.That’s why I give a lot of blogger examples, because they’re high traffic, so it’s easy for me to like quickly pull trends out. Most people are not professional bloggers and do not have that large of a data set. And so what I like to do is I look monthly when I’m doing content planning to say okay, like how did my content this past month perform? How did the content, you know, my legacy content performed because you know, as you guys know, like it’s not just, you know, today being in February, I’m not just looking at January and every content that happened before that is dead, right? No. Like those things are still producing and still working for me, too.
So first I’d look at directly January to see how that content is going, and then I look farther back to see all of my content. And then I’m really making the decision like, you know what pieces of content are performing really well? Like, why might that be, and are there any trends? Right? Going back to that teenager example like, oh interesting, like, I’m seeing that all the people really like when I talk about pet grooming, right? Okay, that’s really interesting, maybe I need more content around that. And then like, the alternative is true, too: do you have pieces of content that are not performing well? Why might that be? Are there trends there? So I’m always looking for like themes and trends, and then I really base it from there. So then I might tweak my content strategy a little bit to see. Okay, if my theory is that more content on Pet Grooming is going to increase my traffic and get more people on my email list, let me maybe, you know, double that amount of content I do this month on pet grooming and reduce, you know, flea treatment (I don’t know why I came up with this dog example).
So that’s kind of what I would do. And like, in general, when I think about experimenting, I have a mentor from when I was in corporate and he always says, “Don’t guess; test.” And it’s like my favorite saying, and so a lot of times I’ll implement that. But I really try to keep it to like a once-a-month thing. And that’s true for both content performance and marketing, right? Just because, you know, Mary’s having luck with Tiktok doesn’t mean that you’re gonna have luck with TikTok, right? And it could have nothing to do with strategy.
I actually have another example: like, I have been a professional blogger. I know Pinterest strategy, hands down, super well. I grew my productivity blog to 2 million pageviews a year off of Pinterest; like I know Pinterest. When I try to do Pinterest for my current business talking about analytics, I’ll get 13 clicks in four months. 13 clicks, right? Because it has nothing to do with strategy; like I know the strategy. But people on Pinterest are not interested in learning Google Analytics tips. It’s a misalignment. So like, same person, right? wildly different results. 2,000,013. Like, couldn’t be farther from different, right? Or farther? I think you know what I mean.
Abby Herman
Couldn’t be more different.
Jennifer Grayeb
Couldn’t be more different. So I’m not the words person; I’m the numbers person. But yeah, so that is kind of like, it’s like people are so quick to be like, Oh, well, this is working for that person, and this is working for that person. And I’d like to just do this monthly numbers review, where I’m looking at everything and saying, like what’s working for me? And if month-over-month, Pinterest is not working for me, then maybe I need to stop doing Pinterest and spend that time on the things that are working for me.
Abby Herman
Yeah, and I think it’s important to note, too, that a lot of it is cyclical. And it’s really important to look at, to compare your numbers year-to-year, in addition to month-to-month. So is January, and just from the sales perspective, is January typically a really slow month for you? So that’s something that you can plan for and you can plan ahead. If you are a seasonal-type business, it’s important to know that if you sell a product, you know, you’re going to want to beef up your content starting in likely July, in preparation for the holidays and the holiday rush. And then when January comes, you probably, you know, that’s a really good planning time for you to look at what happened last year each month, and how can you plan your content for the future based on that, and based on what people were looking at? Like, you mentioned the bullet journal; several years ago, I mean, it was all over the place. Bullet journaling was everywhere. I don’t remember the last time I heard about it, you know, recently; it’s just, people are not talking about it. I know people are still doing it, but it’s not as popular as it was. So if you were creating bullet journaling posts right now, they might not do as well.
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, yeah, it’s super interesting to like, watch it all unfold and 100%. And I think this goes back to why we’re like a perfect complement to one another, like people need both of us in their world. Because, you know, I might be looking more short-term based on the immediate numbers, and then you’re able to pull back and say, hey what about, you know, think about this; and then we can kind of partner to like, look at all the numbers together. So yes, it’s spot-on. Like, there’s definitely pieces when I did that organizing stuff, like my organizing content did do really well in January. And it did really well in May. Because it was like, New Year people wanted to get their lives together, and then May it was like your life kind of has fallen apart between January and May again, and now it’s spring cleaning, right? So I could do really well with those pieces of content. Seems like back-to-school, right? Like I worked with a lot of the bloggers that were you know, parenting bloggers, and so, like, we started school stuff, like back-to-school in like May, even though that’s when school was getting out, but that’s when parents are starting to think well what am I going to do over the summer to make sure my kids are still engaged and still learning and out of my hair, and like making sure that they’re up to speed, moving into the next grade set. So yeah, there’s definitely like, when I say monthly I would not negate the power of your kind of annual content planning and thinking about the themes and stuff, but for the monthly pulses more of those like micro pivots that you would make each month.
Abby Herman
Yes. Awesome. Well, I am really excited to hear more from you at The Content Experiment Summit coming up on March 15. Until then, can you share, we’re definitely going to include a link to the Traffic Insights Dashboard in the show notes. But can you let people know where to find you online so they can learn more?
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m most active on Instagram. So my handle’s just @jennifergrayeb which is my first and last name. So you can use show notes for that, because I know the spelling sometimes is difficult with just hearing it. And/or you can just check out my website, which links to all the social media platforms, and that is thenimbleco.com.
Abby Herman
Fantastic, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate all of your insights.
Jennifer Grayeb
Yeah, thanks for having me. This was so fun.
Abby Herman
I hope that after listening to today’s episode, you feel a little more confident about looking at your data. Stop blindly publishing content and start making informed decisions about what content you need to share with your audience. I promise that you’ll save so much time and frustration. I cannot wait to learn more from Jennifer at The Content Experiment Summit. You can register right now at thecontentexperiment.com/summit. And again, we’re getting started in just a couple of days. If you found value in what you learned here today, be sure to share it on social media. Take a screenshot of the episode on your phone and share it over on Instagram stories. Tag me at @abbymherman and @thecontentexperiment and you can tag Jennifer at @jennifergrayeb. The more you share, the more we can get the podcast into the hands of more business owners just like you who need to hear the message that they are not alone. Until next time, take care.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
