One important step towards improving your writing is to evaluate the impact of your previous work. How effective was your last email newsletter? How many times was it opened? Did anyone click through to the website? Did anyone donate as a result of taking action at the end of an article?
So how can you measure the impact of your writing?
Get Analytics
If you do only one thing today get Google Analytics installed on your website or ask your webmaster if you're already using it.
It shows you which pages are the most popular, which countries are visiting your website, what websites are referring people to you, and who's finding you on Google using which keywords.
Google Analytics also shows you engagement statistics - how long people spend on each page, how many pages on average they visit and how they clicked through your website.
You can even track the success of your campaigns by setting up "process filters" - tracking how people click through from a campaign page, to a donation page then on to a "thank you" page and at which point you lose people.
This sort of analysis can help you find weak links in your content chain and help improve your writing and therefore your conversion rate. For example, if your campaign page sends 70% of readers through to your donation page, but only 3% see a "thank you" page, the writing on the donation form needs to be more persuasive, or the donation process itself needs simplifying. The good news is that your campaign copy is successfully persuading people to donate, you just need to improve your writing elsewhere.
If you’re not using Google Analytics or a similar analysis package, you’re blind to how your content is performing, how your online audience is reacting to your website and whether or not you're satisfying their interests, wants or needs.
Get Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools can help you monitor how Google views your website and its content.
You can use it to monitor your ranking position for your most popular keywords and even find keywords for which you'd like to perform better.
Use the two Google tools regularly to get the best out of your search engine traffic and make it part of your weekly or monthly routine. Google Analytics can be set up to email you a weekly or monthly PDF report which can help you spot and react to trends, so that you can keep improving your content and drive more traffic to your website.
Look for stickiness
You can use Google Analytics to review the performance of an individual page as well as an entire website. Use it to look at how your new piece of writing is performing.
Is anyone reading? Where are they coming from? What did they type into a search engine to land on this page? Which town do they live in (especially useful if you want to analyse the impact of geographically-specific content)?
How long do people spend on your page? If they only spend 10 seconds you can assume that they're not reading your article. Why is that? Is it badly-written? Is it relevant? Does it convey the most important information at the top?
Do people leave the site after reading your article? You can tell if you have a high "bounce rate" for the page you're analysing. If so, how can you use your writing to improve the stickiness of the site? Providing clear next steps and related content can help keep people on your site for longer and drive down that bounce rate over time.
Look for effectiveness
Even if your page is really sticky and people spend an average of 10 minutes reading one article, it could be doing nothing for you unless you persuade the reader to take some form of action afterwards.
You should look at having at least one clear outcome for each piece of content you write (otherwise, what's the point of writing it?) and then work towards that outcome by providing the reader with a clear call to action.
This action could be a high-impact action such as "donate now" or "become a volunteer" to more low-impact actions such as "share this page on Facebook" or "join our newsletter".
Use analytics to monitor how many people click "donate", "follow us on Twitter", "sign our petition" or any key actions after reading your article.
Look for trends
Keep an eye on how things are constantly developing.
Sometimes you can perform well on Google for a keyword you never expected. This is called the "long tail" of Google search. Think about how can you can capitalise on this unexpected popularity by writing more specific content around that theme.
Also, remember that a good, interesting and relevant content will always be popular, so write content to last. While it's good to ride the wave of a breaking news story or an internet trend, the content you write now may still be generating lots of regular traffic in 12 months' time.
Social media is becoming a very popular referrer of traffic to nonprofit websites. If Facebook or Twitter is sending a lot of traffic to your site maybe it’s time to get an presence on there and join in the conversation.
Learn how to write effective content for social networks - Twitter is limited to 140 character posts, so your techniques for writing effective headlines should be useful here. Think about how to write a wall post for Facebook - again, what is the intended outcome of that post? A click through to your website? Attendance at an event? How will you make it happen? Even a status update can be a piece of persuasive writing: put some thought into everything you write and you will start to reap the beenfits.
Take notice of reactions
Read the comments on your pages, on Twitter, on blogs and on those blogs' comments. This is all genuine user feedback, the sort you don't always get in satisfaction surveys or online questionnaires. People can be brutally honest on the internet, but take criticism constructively and it can only improve your offer to your benefactors.
You can always use positive comments and true stories and use them in your annual reports and reports to funders etc. Take heart from the fact that you're making a real difference to people's lives and that the content you're writing is actually incredibly powerful.
Next: Step 6: Optimise