If you've launched your Guide into the wild (you should have), and you've made it this far, we have a secret to tell you: Launching your guide isn't actually the best part of the guide creation process.
The best part, by far is regrouping, and collecting information from your readers about what information they found valuable within your Guide. If you pushed publish, you should be collecting information by now. Who has read your guide? What sections are people reading? Better yet, what sections are people skipping?
Once you're armed with that information, you can provide them something that no other content publishing platform on the Internet can today--even more value with both refined and new content from directly within the guide they've subscribed to already.
Now, figure out what can you delete, reword, and improve.
No one, not even Michelangelo, can sculpt a masterpiece in one day. Masterpieces are the result of continuous refinement, and a commitment to reworking the content until it's in its most DISTILLed form.
Chances are, now that you've completed the Guide building process for the first time, you'll notice a lot of information that can be improved and reworked. That's okay. Get started. It's time to get your hands dirty again and begin refining your content.
Add new content sections, but start with the DISTILL process again. Deconstruct your topics, gather your ideas, select the more important points, start re-organizing your content, then write the new content.
If you still to the DISTILL process your readers will love you, your content will shine, and you'll compile a resource they can reuse over and over again.
Distill it.
The most powerful tool built into the Guides.co platform is the analytics we've built into each Guide. Content creators can now get real-time information on how readers are interacting with content, what content is getting passed over, and exactly where people are taking the time to read and comment on Pages within a Guide.
This information can be wrapped up to provide detailed information about how everyone is using the Guide, or broken down to a reader-by-reader view that will then provide details about exactly who is reading content or ignoring it.
In this section we'll be taking a look at some of these tools, and the feature set for each of the analytics tools available to Guide publishers.
Once you have launched your Guide, and people start reading the content you have published online, it's time to start tracking how many people have read your Guide. We've built some fantastic analytic tools to help you gain insights on who's reading your Guide, and how their interacting with your content.
To get access to the Guide Dashboard, click on your user profile, then the Guide Dashboard button that appears in the popup from the menu.
This page, the Guide activity overview, is where you can have a quick glance at how your Guide is performing. On this page you'll find your visit and user counts, an engagement graph broken down by the date, a heatmap for your entire Guide, traffic referral information, a list of people reading your Guide, a global map of where your current readers live, and your Guide's conversion rate.
The Visit count is the number of people, both new and old, who have visited your content over the last 30 days (you can toggle the 90 day number as well in the top right corner). The New User count is the total number of brand new users who have signed up for your Guide in the last 30 day window (or 90 day window if you've toggled the switch).
This is a great way to quickly gauge if you're reaching enough readers.
Once you've begun grabbing attention and new readers are interacting with your Guide, you can start to break down readership information even further.
This report is a quick overview of the number of how many times a new user has downloaded your Guide (in grey), and the number of page views across your Guide (in blue). The grey graph consists of brand new users who downloaded the Guide, whereas the page views across the Guide (the blue bar) is a cumulative number based on everyone, new and old, interacting with your content.
At this point you have people, both new and old, reading your Guide. Our Guide Heatmap will help you break down exactly what content your readers are engaging with while interacting with your Guide. The darker the orange colour, the more interactions you've had on a page. You can also break this information down on a user-by-user basis. We'll cover that on the next Page.
It's important to know who is sending you traffic and where your readers are coming from before they land on your Guide. This type of information will help you focus your marketing efforts and reach out to those who have already begun promoting your Guide.
In this section you'll see your top traffic referrers. Don't be surprised if you see names like Google, and Facebook in this list, as well as other more niche websites around the internet.
On this page there is also a quick listing of your latest readers, along with information on how long ago the signed up for your Guide. If you would like to expand this information to include all of your subscribers, you can click the "View All" button.
This fun widget actually provides quite a bit of insight about your market, and where people are visiting your Guide from around the world. You may find yourself surprised and uncover other important markets for your content that you hadn't considered in the past. Hovering over countries will reveal user information for each country. The darker the blue, the more readers you have in a particular country.
Finally, the conversion rate is determined by the number of people who have landed on your Guide marketing page (before purchase), and then how many people purchased your Guide from that page. This is a great tool to use while optimizing your Guide landing page, and the information found therein. The higher the number, the more people you are converting into readers.
In addition to a heatmap overview of your entire Guide, we also provide Guide publishers with granular tools to research exactly what specific readers are engaging with and what information they're skipping over. By visiting the "People" link in the Guide Editor, you can begin to focus in on your readers, and determine what content they seem to be gravitating to and which they seem to be avoiding.
We believe Guides are liveable documents, and as such, you're able to refine your content and messaging continuously. Our heatmaps help you determine what content is your best content. By determining what content is your most important, you can then arm yourself with that information and create more content that people are interested in, eliminate content people avoid, or even reach out to readers who seem to be skipping over a lot of your content.
In addition to content oversights, our heatmaps also provide you with quick list management tools to reach out to active, new, or readers that are slipping away. Using our in-app messaging tools, you can then re-enage those readers who may be moving on from your content.
How do you message your readers? We'll explore that further on the next Page.