Anybody Else Want to Beat the Averages? I Did.

On Thursday I posted a link to my employment bio on a couple of social media profiles, with the specific goal of monitoring how it performed.

Let’s discuss.

I broke it into 5 parts, because otherwise it’s tough to see how far down the page readers go. Making them click on “read the rest by clicking here” might be mildly annoying, but it is the simplest way I could measure.

If you’ve not been around web analytics, it’s a cup of cold reality splashed in your face. Turns out that when nobody is watching, people really don’t care about your favorite new amazing content nearly as they would tell you if they were sitting in the same room.

Post a 10 minute video of your kid on your blog, and you’ll be lucky to average 2 minutes of time spent on that page. People simply do not care. They care about things when it’s about them. Make people click through 5 parts of a story, and you are lucky to get 3 or 4 percent of them to make it to the end.

A good copywriter writes in such a way as to make people keep reading. I am not under the impression that I have already arrived, but I am proud to say that almost half (45.94%) of the 441 people who clicked on that first page clicked all the way through to the last page of my bio.

I CRUSHED the industry average.

Now, considering the audience (upwards of 95% came via facebook, and presumably a majority of those are my acquaintances, not folks who don’t know me) and the content (a blow-by look at my last 10 years of life), it would make sense that this target audience is very interested. But very interested would be 10% in web-world. I got over 40%.

The business lessons? First, stories sell. Second, and more fundamental, there is no shortcut around high quality content presented with an eye toward engagement.