Measuring your reach

As a writer it is important that you are able to assess the reach of your marketing. Hit counters on blogs may be able to give you a snapshot but it is only a partial picture of your actual level of influence. Today I'd like to suggest to you a few different resources that you can use to help determine your reach. These are only three of the things I am currently doing to determine my reach. Start by using these and see your level of influence.

Google Alerts
This service alerts you when word you specify are accessed. I have mine programmed to alert me for Tiffany Colter, Tiffany Coulter or Writing Career Coach.

How this helps: I have found a number of blogs that have mentioned me. I am able to go and personally thank them [which is simply polite] as well as find out the kinds of blogs/bloggers who find things helpful on my blog. Also, I am able to see whether it is an individual blog or my website in general that is most helpful. This allows me to adjust my blogs to be more helpful to my readers.

Google Analytics
We've looked at this a number of times but this bears repeating for those of you who have not heard of it yet. This free service offers many useful things to the owner of a blog or website. It is VERY user friendly and tells you what pages are most popular, daily hit count, source of those hits and a variety of other useful information.

How this helps: I am able to determine where my traffic is coming from [whether a link on someone's website or marketing I've personally done]. I am also able to assess the strength of blog tours and online e-zines by tracking hits following the release of those blogs/articles.

Search Engines
I go in to Yahoo, google, askjeeves and others to see where I am coming up. I also google things like "Writing Coach" or "Writing Career Coach" to check my ranking.

How this helps: I am able to see what people are first learning about me when they do a search. This varies by search engine so checking a few different places is helpful. You need to know what others are learning about you. You also need to know if your blog is ranking well in search engines on your topic. If not, what can you do to improve?

So, for Monday you have some work to do. Go out and determine your reach. [And write blogs with my name in them so I will come. Laugh. You know I'll be watching!]

Tomorrow we will talk about how to use the information you've learned at all of those writer's conferences, articles, blogs and coaches.

Your Coach for the Journey, Tiffany Colter

Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at www.WritingCareerCoach.com
Learn more about Tiffany's Marketing techniques on her main blog.
Read Tiffany's award winning manuscript "A Face in the Shadow" on her fiction blog.