Online Engagement Platform for Smart Bloggers

We are bloggers. Anything you consistently write online basically makes you a blogger. We get people to read and react to whatever it is we have to say. We aspire to be the Smart Blogger. So, we set up a blog via WordPress. We use Social Media to create visibility and buzz. We conquer Google Analytics to learn more about our audience. We discover Disqus to help us curate and manage our interactions. We rigorously search through Google and Twitter to see what our competitors are doing and what’s trending. We use Mention to see whether someone is talking about us. And the cycle continues.

You have set everything up and think that now the magic will happen. Everything is automated and you have your precious time for writing great content. Instead, you waste your resources tracking, monitoring, setting up dashboards, measurements and goals. Only to find out that once you feel like you’ve automated all the processes, the same amount of time and energy is being spent keeping track of all the data. Exhausting. Contemporary smart blogging has more to do with data science than writing. So what do you do?

There are two main components of running a successful blog: great content, of course, and timely engagement. Content and engagement should be what you spend most of your time and efforts on. Thus, we’ve challenged ourselves with an ambitious project of creating the utmost Engagement Platform for every smart blogger. Are we magicians? No! Is it completed yet? Yes!

Blogger’s Vicious Cycle

Remember: analytics are very important! But you never set up a blog because you want to monitor stuff. People also do not visit your blog due to numerical reasons. They come for valuable content and engagement. People want to learn something, discuss that in the comments and maybe send it to a friend for a quick read. That’s what blogging is all about.

But how do you create great content without data on your posts, audience and overall performance? You need raw data that will be available at all times and in real-time. Vicious cycle, you’d think: I can’t waste time monitoring and analysing data or my content writing will be put to sacrifice, but at the same time, I cannot write relevant content without the data. Not really! Once you have all the analytics within one place, it’ll save you that precious time to do the important things. And with that Octoboard will help!

Being a Smart Blogger with Octoboard

Now when you are absolutely confused, let’s get all that successful blogging talk clarified. What we do at Octoboard is try to equip you with all the armour (made of data, of course) to conquer that blogging challenges! But let’s take each challenge one at a time. Dealing with one will lead to overcoming the other. This is how it works.

Challenge I: All-encompassing real-time and historical data

You set up so many tools and platforms only to gather data on your posts’ performance, your audience, engagement and so on. You might not even remember everything you’ve arranged. It’s simply exhausting to go from Google Analytics to WordPress, and then to Facebook Insights, and tens and hundreds of other places to see what’s going on. Instead, create an ecosystem, where you’ll tailor your own platform from where you can set up all the metrics from across various sources of data you need!

Imagine this: you have a blog on WordPress.com, then you switched to your own server at WordPress.org. To keep a better track of user engagement you’ve set up Disqus, and that’s where you engage with your audience from. Do you really want to have three tabs open, plus much more?

Unlike WordPress that also shows some metrics on your latest posts and comments, Octoboard keeps your data safe so that you can access it at any time. Oh, there’s more! With Octoboard, you can now simply use one dashboard and add various widgets to compare and combine different sets of data. WordPress (org + com), Disqus, Social Media*, Google News, Twitter Search and Google Analytics.

From within one place you can now gather extensive information that actually makes sense. Having combined various metrics, you’ll see all the intertwined bits of data and you’ll start spotting trends and insights to help you improve your blog strategy.

Octoboard widgets for Smart Blogging in three words:

WordPress (org + com): visitor actions, engagement, top contributors

Disqus: top/latest posts, engagement, comments

Social Media: performance, engagement, audience

Google News/Twitter Search: brand monitoring, competition analysis, trends spotting

Google Analytics: audience insights, content & page analysis, website performance

*Octoboard covers 8+ Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, VK

So, why do you need this much information, again, if numbers aren’t the sole point of your blog? You need this whole bunch of data in order to write compelling content that resonates with YOUR audience. That’s it! And what’s next? Once your audience starts reading and reacting to your content, they’d expect you reacting back. Not just reacting back but doing that in a timely fashion!

Challenge II: Engagement & Timely Responses

Have you ever wondered why those YouTube vloggers get to monetize their activities? It’s all about Engagement! So if YouTube vlogging success gets measured via Engagement, your blogging activities are too.

It’s not enough merely provoking reactions from your audience. You have to keep that Engagement going! If you don’t talk back, discuss and engage, you’ll soon find your Engagement rates decrease dramatically.

Every time you go to sleep or take three hours off for non-disruptive writing you are missing an opportunity to engage with your users. People expect you to reply, like, share whatever they have to say yesterday! That’s just how it works. So instead of constantly going from Disqus to Twitter and back to WordPress, simply follow your audience behaviour from our Engagement feed. If anything new happens, you’ll spot it in no time. And you’ll be able to get that reply fetched when someone still cares for whatever you have to say!

Challenge III: Spend time on What Matters!

Start working smart. Get a solid grip on your engagement and readers. Let Octoboard do all the routine work for you! So that you can focus on what really matters – topic research, content production and timely engagement with your readers. Leave us all the analytical work, focus on being creative and innovative. That’s why people would want to read your blog: you provide great content and respond on time. Not because your Google Analytics knowledge is skyrocketing or because you can switch 10 tabs within 5 seconds!

Why Use Octoboard for Smart Blogging, Again? 

• All your data in one place — WordPress (org + com), Disqus, Social Media, Google News, Twitter Search and Google Analytics.
• Real-time Engagement — Reach and engage with your readers! Immediate reaction will ensure recurring engagement from your blog visitors.
• Spend your time wisely — Get rid of distracting tasks. Stop constant logins. Spend time on what matters – creating content, reaching out and engaging with your readers!