Print magazines tout their circulation numbers, but how do you know how many people are actually seeing your particular ad in that magazine? When people do see your ad and act by visiting your site, there’s no way to know they came as a result of that ad without directly asking them.
Your analytics data will show them as direct traffic if the visitor input the URL into the browser. Or if the visitor used search to find your domain, the visit will appear as search traffic. Either way, you don’t know what kind of actions happened as a result of your magazine ad.
Maybe the ad was a great success. Maybe it was just throwing money away. It’s almost impossible to know.
Blog Posts Provide Metrics
With homeschool blog reviews, however, the analytics data on your site can monitor traffic sources, naming the exact homeschool blogs that sent traffic and how many visits occurred. You will know how many visits happened as a result of your blog review campaign and exactly which bloggers sent that traffic.
(This data is gathered by your own site’s analytics such as Google Analytics. iHomeschool Network cannot access that data for you. Before your review campaign, talk to your web developer to confirm that you have installed an analytics function on your site.)
Blog Posts Have Longevity
The beauty of a blog review as opposed to a magazine is longevity. The life span of a magazine is a few days or weeks at best. Once it’s read, it’s typically discarded. In the best case scenario, the magazine is passed down to another interested reader who might also see your ad.
A blog post, however, is accessible online indefinitely. Savvy bloggers like the bloggers at iHomeschool Network know how to create attractive pinnable images that are shared on Pinterest for weeks, months, even years after the blog post publication date. Because that same blog post is optimized for SEO (search engine optimization), Internet searchers can be led directly to those blog posts that answer their specific questions.
Take a look at our matches page to see what your product reviews or sponsored posts might look like.
Blog Posts are Valuable Content
People read magazines for the articles not the ads. When you use blog posts to promote your products, you are injecting your message directly into the content of the blog where the readers are focused.
Getting into a blog post is far more valuable than taking out ad space in a blog’s sidebar because blog readers ignore ads just like magazine readers do. With sponsored posts or product reviews, you are the superhero not the forgotten sidekick.
Get in touch with us today to see how blog posts can work for your marketing strategy.
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