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If you have a company right now, you need to be producing content. Period. Every company is a media company; I’ve been saying it for years, and it is happening now. So don’t get left behind. Make great content, and you’ll see the results, I promise.

But let’s say you’re putting out that content, and now you want to determine if the content you are creating is valuable. Is it working? Is it good? How do you make sure the content you are producing is hitting home?

That is a tremendous question. There are two ways to go about this.

Number one is the surface level, the thing you need to be doing daily and weekly. Look at the raw engagement numbers. How many people are sharing? How many people are leaving comments? How many views are your videos getting? These are very important and basic engagement numbers, and they help. A lot. If you are provoking a reaction in the people consuming your content, that’s great news. The fact that someone goes out of their way to share or comments means a lot, believe me. That’s time out of their day. Pay attention.

Number two is big picture: how many people are actually buying? How many books did you sell because you provided so much free content to begin with? Maybe there was a day you put out a particularly awesome piece of content, and sales spiked that day. Always keep track of what is going out when, and how that affects traffic to your retail site or app or whatever you’re doing. And when you start keeping a close and careful eye on traffic, you’ll start noticing how the sales are affected by it as well.

At the end of the day, the way you should be judging your content is by the results that you’re looking for. If you’re not getting what you want, it’s not effective content. Now, there is some small value in putting out content that you don’t think will end in a sale, but not much. You can pay to promote something with no ROI too to help get you there. I promise. But in the end, don’t lose sight of the end goal. What do you really want to get from making this content?

Oh and one more thing: to get you guys started making the content, here is a guide I put together on how to get started making content:

How to Choose the Right Platforms for Your Brand