How do we form the best relationships; bring our best to them; build environments that nurture them; and measure our success?
Join the Comment Box Conference. Ask questions. Discuss answers. Meet people in the comment box. Find out.
Easton Ellsworth
Easton Ellsworth New Media Consultant is the founder of Visionary Blogging, which advises entrepreneurs and businesses on how to use blogs and social media tools with a better sense of strategy in order to generate superior results. He especially loves using the social Web to change the offline world, which he tried to do as assistant event coordinator for Blog Action Day 2008.
Easton is bringing information on
Visionary Blogging Improvements
How to Improve Your Blogger Attributes, Blogging Skills and Your Blog Itself
- Helping others think about and use blogs and social media tools with a strong sense of vision and purpose
- Writing blog content that generates results that help your business’s bottom line
- Creating an integrated blog/social media strategy
- Generating buzz for an online event using blogs and social media
- Monitoring the blogosphere and social media websites for maximum awareness of a subject.
Easton’s experience ranges from personal blogs to a huge network. He’s helped us all in some way.
Easton,
So good to have you around here again!
All right folks, step right up! Throw me some curveballs! 🙂
Thanks Liz. Thank you very much and to Vicky Hennegan and anyone/everyone else who organized this. Glad to be here.
What are some of the components to creating a coordinating blog & social media strategy?
Is someone collecting all the wisdom from the comments for future publication here? A recap from this conference?
Good question Vicky. Writing a reply …
Hi Easton,
I’m going to give it my best shot!
Meanwhile, what’s the single improvement most blogs need … in your opinion?
Hey Easton, Liz & all!
What are the tools you use to monitor an event’s success on the web?
The basic steps:
1. Determine where your blog fits within your overall business/entity/cause.
2. Determine where each other piece of social media fits into the big picture as well.
3. Determine how to stick the blog puzzle piece in with the other social media pieces in order to produce maximum results.
Of course there’s lots to do within each step. 🙂 But here are some keys – go to slide 20 of 26 on this presentation: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11674893/Blogging-Strategies
Hi Laurett,
No webcast. We’re solely talking in type. Texting in long hand.
Yikes, great question Liz. Replying …
I use Google Analytics, the number of comments on a post, Stumble Upon & Deliscious.
I asked this question earlier, in kind of the wrong place. I have blog for my fledgling interior design business (which will hopefully grow to include more creative consulting in general along with writing about design and creativity). I’m curious about how much of my personality to allow into my blog and other business related social media. Like I said earlier, I’m not wanting any “dear diary” moments, but the blogs I enjoy most have a definite personal voice. I just wonder how my voice translates to getting/repelling customers.
@Lauren I would think that would depend on the article. If you are expressing your own opinion, than that’s a good time to get more personal.
If you are trying to be objective and not take sides, then you don’t want your personal opinion slanting anyones evaluation.
Does that help?
Still replying 🙂 …
Liz asked: “Meanwhile, what’s the single improvement most blogs need … in your opinion?” – Better strategy. Better planning, I think. Too many of us get into a mode where we’re taking it one day at a time. We need to step back and look at the blog from a thousand miles away. It’s a blog. It’s like a phone. But what can you do with it? Then let your mind create amazing ideas and then you can run with them. That alone would make content and design and community just soar like nothing else. Regular, imaginative planning.
Hi Lauren,
You never want to leave your voice out. Then what’s left is information only and information is all over the web. People come to your blog for YOU.
Where the knack is learning how to be authentic without being naked. The way to do that is just decide your own rules. A consistent voice draws it’s own readers. They understand how far you’ll go and not.
Char (hi!) asked: “What are the tools you use to monitor an event’s success on the web?”
1. Website traffic counters/analytics – Sitemeter/Statcounter do a good job of basic visitor info and Google Analytics does a great job of almost all the rest. I know there’s lots of great tools out there.
2. Registration/readerships counters – FeedBurner etc. for feed/email subscriptions.
3. Video/podcast viewer/listener metrics … I haven’t gotten into these too much since I’ve only ever focused on measuring event-related audio/video at one particular site … but in the future I will probably try to use some of these: http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track-online-traffic/
4. Any tool needed to measure whatever key metric you really have – if it’s lead conversion or purchases you’re really after, then you need to watch the payment system, etc.
I feel like I am at the point you mentioned in Comment17.
I’ve learned so much in the last year. Last year’s plan seems out of date. Now I need to stop, incorporate it into a plan, and then execute
@VickyH, which stats do you watch in Google Analytics? I was told I’m tracking wrong ones, but wasn’t enlightened which ones to follow.
Ooops Comment16
Lauren asked: “I have a blog for my fledgling interior design business (which will hopefully grow to include more creative consulting in general along with writing about design and creativity). I’m curious about how much of my personality to allow into my blog and other business related social media. Like I said earlier, I’m not wanting any “dear diary” moments, but the blogs I enjoy most have a definite personal voice. I just wonder how my voice translates to getting/repelling customers.”
Lauren, I’d recommend letting a lot of you out into the blog. If it’s dry and impersonal, it will almost defeat the purpose. You have to make the reader feel that passion that you have for interior design. You don’t have to be Shakespeare, but you do need to let that bleed out into your writing just how much you love what you do and how much you love benefiting others in that way. See: http://www.skelliewag.org/writing-dirty-61.htm
I wanted to track which Google search criteria had brought them to my page… But actually such a small percentage came from Google, it was hard to see any patterns.
How many hits per day. The first day a new post was up, how many days it got a reasonable number of hits, then tapered off bad.
Entrance page, exit page
“… learning how to be authentic without being naked.” I love that Liz.
@lauren although there are design rules, what distinguishes you as a designer is how you apply, bend and break those design rules. Your portfolio would represent how you have brought together your taste, aesthetics and expertise to meet your client’s needs. Think of your blog as a place to show how you personify design and meet client needs.
I was shocked at how many people read my FAQ’s and About Us pages. They had a real high readership
Thanks Easton! I will definitely check out the mashable link.
Metrics in general to watch:
1. Number of visitors versus number of page views
2. Time spent on site
3. Bounce rate (lower the better, it means people who come and immediately leave)
4. Traffic sources – hopefully not all in the Google basket
5. Number of pages indexed in search engines
6. Ranking of your website for the keyword or phrase that appears first in the page title of your site (e.g. Liz is number one with this site for “Liz Strauss” https://www.successful-blog.com/)
I’ll think of some others in a sec.
You’re welcome Char!
Thanks everyone. I especially like the authentic not naked.
What tools do you use to organize the metrics and other statistics? A spreadsheet?
Obviously the real key metric, if you can quantify it, is how many people who come to my blog do what I what them to do? And compare that regularly to, What percent or what raw number do I need to break even or to make a nice profit or make it worth it?
I feel like I’m not utilizing Twitter as well as I could. Some days I feel like I’m just making small talk without building a real conversation.
I’m chatting a bit with others and highlight some posts I find interesting others and mine).
How do you use Twitter?
How much relevance do you place on SEO when your blogging?
Yeah Vicky, you can use a spreadsheet to monitor and with a lot of things just measure them once a month or at most once a week. It’s like the stock market. It’s okay if traffic goes down one month to the next – just keep an eye on why and also on trends.
I use Firefox bookmark folders to load a bunch of metric sites at once, then plug in variables really quickly across them all and write the results down in a spreadsheet. I have a calendar reminder to do that tracking every so often on my site, my clients’ sites, etc.
Re: comment #32: I love SEO. It’s like building your vocabulary. You should always speak from the heart and speak simply, but there are times when a less-known or more obscure word is actually more effective. SEO knowledge lets you get that edge on the next person when it comes to getting and keeping attention. There’s SEO to get people to actually find you in the search engines, and then the copywriting and content/design aspects of it to get them to actually do what you want once they arrive at your site.
That said, you can get bogged down in meaningless SEO details or place too much emphasis on it. The real key is that you’re using a tool called a blog to reach people and engage with them. So you have to balance talking to people with making it so that search engines can help them find you. A library with all the spines torn off the books, or with books having non-descriptive titles, is like a world where SEO is ignored.
And it depends on the niche. If you’re the only one out there blogging exclusively about left-handed fishermen in Wales and your business is selling left-handed tools to them only, you probably don’t have to try too hard re: SEO.
Easton, recently I was told “time on site” and “pageviews/visits” aren’t good measures cuz “those people are mad at you because they can’t find what they want”. Really? I’d think it depends on the blog. May mean they’re really enjoying it.
Here’s pretty much all the metrics I pay attention to with blogs: http://www.visionaryblogging.com/blog-improvement-checklist/ That grew out of research I did after seeing this classic from Liz: https://www.successful-blog.com/blog-review/blog-review-checklist/
Easton,
Thanks so much for sharing all your knowledge with us. I’m curious: How many times a week do you think someone should blog? Is there a chance if you don’t blog a certain number of times you can lose people altogether?
Easton,
I just let #32 Green Panda out of moderation.
Glenda, that *may* be true. But you have to consider all the variables in order to understand better what each one means. I’ve read (and my own experience would seem to indicate) that MySpace, for instance, has inflated traffic numbers because of all the time people spend on it trying to figure out where that one thingy is or how to trick out that one part of their profile. Then again, there are sites where people are on for a long time (like this one) because they’re reading, pondering, leaving comments, etc. and like it. And again, who cares if a million people come to your site and stay 10 hours a day if you don’t actually lead them to some meaningful outcome – buying something from you, buying something via ads you display, making friends, learning, etc.
VickyH,I track my site stats in a spreadsheet every Sat am. Also record any significant things, like a mention at a WordCamp or important link back or @chrisbrogan tweet!
Anita, that’s such a great question. It boils down to doing it in a way that drives your audience wild – and maybe that means you change rhythms if/when your audience evolves. Usually this means regularly, maybe once a day like people used to be accustomed to reading the daily paper every morning, or maybe Mon/Wed/Fri, etc. Then again, you have blogs like http://www.doshdosh.com/ that have achieved enormous popularity despite erratic publishing times. Maybe people like the suspense of waiting, or maybe they just care about qualit and not frequency. or me personally, I know I’ve got to be more regular – but hey, I’m still building a fledgling business myself and it’s just too tempting sometimes to publish something immediately that you were about to shelf for a rainy day.
And again, if it’s good – the more the merrier. Give the rabid fans as much as they can handle, because their appetites are much bigger than your casual fans’.
How long in advance to you write your posts? I know some bloggers always have 2 or 3 posts, just in case, already written.
And Anita, in general you’ll lose many more people by alienating them with a post that bothers them than by not posting. Unless maybe your blog is supposed to be like a constant fount of breaking news – then it’s the absence of fresh content itself that makes them mad.
It is interesting to read the discussion here about the various metrics. I feel like I am still trying to get a good handle on which metrics really quantify “do the people that come to my blog do what I want them to do” especially when it is something as ethereal as “learn”.
@beanfair
@Glenda #42 That’s great to track, and maybe even publish on like a Press or Media page, or even just your About page, those kinds of links and mentions.
@Green Panda #32: I feel that way too about Twitter quite often. One thing I can say is that it helps a lot to just evaluate regularly – how much did I use Twitter? Do I have that sick feeling like I just ate too many sweets? Or do I feel starved, like I missed out? Hopefully you feel like it’s somewhere in the middle – you used it as part of a bigger strategy and you didn’t let it kind of use you. Hope that makes sense. I like to chit chat a bit about my kids being funny, music I’m listening to etc., but try to focus on business stuff I’m doing or have discovered, etc. Whatever will lead people to trust me and either hire me or be willing to refer others to me is great. And just to make someone’s day every now and then is a great quest.
@Vicky #44 I have lots posts/pages half-written or mostly written and just sitting there for the future to finish them off when my muse kicks in, and I try to have a few for rainy days. Last couple weeks I’ve run out of the rainy day ones though. 🙂 It’s great to have 5-10 in case you have to say goodbye for a bit to the blog but don’t want people to wonder where you went.
@Bean It’s hard to measure things like “learning.” You have to just measure the outlines and hope to figure out what animal lies inside them. So if out of 25 comments on your blog in a month, only 5 are “Hey nice post” and 20 are “Here’s what I think” or “Here’s a new thought,” that’s measurable enough to indicate that you’re stimulating minds, for instance.
Thanks so much Easton! This has been very informative and I have a better idea of where to spend my time in the future.
Easton, about to add an “In the Press” [or better word] to my About page – http://www.doitmyselfblog.com/about/
You’re welcome and again, thanks so much to Liz and Vicky for spearheading this, plus anyone else I’m not aware of. Much appreciated and I hope I helped a little. I’ll try to catch up to each of you and say hi privately.
Yay Glenda! Actionable results from this hour! 🙂