What we’re digging: Do you know your Author KPIs?
Over here at AuthorRise headquarters, we’ve been serious since day one about building great tools for our authors. But these days we’re also trying to grow as a business, which means getting serious about keeping track of how things are going.
We’re proponents of data, but only if it serves clear ends. Data for its own sake may lead to lots of pretty charts, but it doesn’t tell you WHAT to do. So we’re working with this great tool called Dashing to build our KPI Dashboard. We’re building it now and look forward to having a real-time view into what’s happening with our business.
Not a business geek? KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators, in other words, the few select numbers that tell you how well you’re doing to meet your goals. For us it’s things like new signups and how well those signups convert to active members. If you want to know more, check out this great post from the team at Tintup: http://www.tintup.com/blog/how-to-create-a-kpi-dashboard/
Authors have KPIs too, but they’re not just sales per month, after all, Sales is a great goal, but knowing that they’re up or down doesn’t tell you much about HOW to get more of them.
So a few potential KPI’s that you might want to track as an author:
audience growth on different social media sites
audience growth on your blog and email list
social media and blog post engagements
If you know and track a few key numbers you can ask yourself questions like “on average, how many twitter followers does it take to get a new email subscriber?” “How many email subscribers does it take to get one sale?”
You don’t need to be super data driven, just curious and willing to put in a little time to keep track of the things that you think are important. The business of being an author is just that, a business. So ask yourself, “Do I understand exactly what I can do to improve my business?”