MackCollier.com

by

Creating Content or Memories; Is Social Media Warping Our Priorities?

5814285236_d3d0271449_z

In 2008 I spoke at a small business conference and during the event for the first time I started tweeting takeaways from the sessions I attended.  The attendees, many of who had no idea what Twitter was, were floored.  They couldn’t believe that there was a conversation happening inside the session they were attending, yet there was an online conversation happening about that same session.  They were hooked on Twitter, and I was hooked on live-tweeting conferences.  I gained dozens of followers an hour.  I looked forward to going to events just to live-tweet the sessions, cause I knew that if the session had a big name speaker, I could possibly gain 100 followers in an hour’s time.  Just from tweeting key takeaways to people sitting at home on their coach.

But after attending a few events I began to realize that while I was expanding my Twitter network, I wasn’t expanding my learning because I wasn’t paying attention during the session.  I told myself that my live-tweeting was a sort of digital note-taking, but the fact was, I wasn’t ‘present’ in that room and involved in the learning that was happening there.  I was on Twitter.

In 2009 I attended SXSW and one of the sessions I couldn’t wait to attend was Kathy Sierra’s talk.  As the talk was getting ready to start, I realized that I had to make a choice between live-tweeting the session, and actually paying attention.  I knew that Kathy’s talk would be wonderful, but would demand my attention.

So I turned off my laptop, and pulled out my notebook.  I took about 10 pages of notes and it was one of the most informative sessions I’ve ever attended at any event.  From that point on, I stopped live-tweeting events and decided that it was more important to be present.

It seems that for many of social media’s heavy users, documenting the moment is more important than living the moment.  Facebook and Twitter has created a culture of narcissism where creating content trumps creating memories.  The allure of Likes and Favs is too great for many of us, and I’m just as guilty as anyone.  Last year I was at an Alabama football game and Bama was about to score and I had my camera out trying to take a picture as they did, and I suddenly realized that I might get a picture of a touchdown, but in the process I will miss seeing it happen.

It’s important to document our experiences, but not if they get in the way of us having those experiences.  It’s a fine line to walk between creating content and living life.  How do you walk that line?  BTW VentureBeat has a fascinating study on this topic.

Pic via Flickr user Andrew Vargas

by

What Every Blogger Wishes You Knew About Pitching Them

J0284982

You’re working for an agency that wants to get the word out about this cool new product/app/website that your client is releasing.  Here’s what you do:

1 – Google “(industry your product/app/website is in) bloggers”

2 – Get contact info of X number of bloggers based on Google search results and those ‘The 50 Best X Bloggers” lists.

3 – Cut and paste contact info into your database/spreadsheet/doc, etc.

4 – Cut and paste press release and send to each blogger, asking them to please email you with a link to their new article promoting your client.

5 – Sit back and wait for a flood of new posts from some of the most influential bloggers on the planet, all gushing about your client.

 

Any blogger that’s been pitched more than once knows there’s zero exaggeration to the above.  At least 90% of agencies and company’s pitching something to bloggers do this, and it never works.  The only good thing about this from the agency’s point of view is that they have been doing it for so long that most bloggers don’t even bother to publicly shame their crappy pitches.

Here’s why this strategy never works:

1 – You start off by building a list of bloggers that you don’t know.  It’s impossible to know every blogger, but uninvited pitches from agencies a blogger doesn’t know isn’t very endearing to that blogger.

2 – You target the most ‘popular’ bloggers.  These are the ones getting the most pitches, right?  So by default, you are setting the bar pretty high for your pitch.  When you simply cut and paste a press release, you are ensuring that your pitch goes straight in the Trash.

3 – You shouldn’t collect contact info to pitch bloggers, you should be collecting contact info to study those bloggers.  Actually read their blogs!  Try to learn a bit about who they are and what they do.  And most importantly, why your pitch would be relevant to them.

4 – Never pitch a stranger then ask them to please let you know when they have written their article promoting you.  That’s the fastest way to get your email posted on Facebook for public ridicule.

 

If I had to pitch bloggers today on a story, here’s the steps I would follow:

1 – Start with my own network.  Is there anyone I know that would be interested in this story?

2 – Start researching the space for X bloggers.  I’d do the same Googling as Step #1 at the top, but I’m not looking for the ‘A-List’ bloggers.  I am looking for B-List bloggers that appear to have a strong community on their blog.  These are bloggers that aren’t getting as many pitches as the A-List, but their strong connection with their readers shows that those readers trust them.  Plus it indicates that they will eventually become A-List bloggers, so it’s better to get on their good side now.

3 – Assemble my list of bloggers I want to pitch, then invest time reading each of their blogs.  I want to take the time to get to know who they are so I can determine if and why my pitch is relevant to them.  Yes, this is time-consuming.  And yes, it can be tedious work.  It can also be the difference between having a 0% response rate, and a 50% response rate.

4 – Once I have culled down my list to only the bloggers that I think would be interested in my pitch, then I start emailing them.  I tailor every pitch to that blogger, zero cutting and pasting is allowed.  I refer to them by their first name, not ‘Dear Blogger’ or ‘Dear Webmaster’ and for pete’s sake not ‘To Whom It May Concern…’  Oh and I make sure I call them by their correct name, as someone that gets pitched constantly as ‘Hey Mark!’, this matters.

5 – I make my pitch as short and relevant as possible.  I point out the nature of my pitch, and how it aligns with the focus of their blog (Which I know, because I took the time to read their blog).  If possible, I reference any posts they have already written about the same space or industry that relates to the story I am pitching.

6 – I end the email by thanking them for their time, and give them my contact info if they have any questions I can help them with.  I don’t ask them to write an article and place no expectations for them other than reading my pitch, and then I thank them for doing so.

 

And to be completely honest, my response rate is still going to be really low.  It will be much better than yours, but the cold, hard reality is that you have been sending crappy pitches to bloggers for so long that most of them have tuned out ALL pitches.  I get up to a dozen a day, and I delete 99% of them without even reading.

But if you are willing to do some legwork and actually give a damn about your job, it’s very possible to successfully pitch bloggers.  This is the best pitch I have ever gotten in 10 years of blogging.  Here’s what Kaitlyn did that made this pitch so great:

1 – She only targeted a handful of bloggers that she knew personally.

2 – She only targeted bloggers that covered marketing on their blogs.

3 – She made her pitch unique and creative.  She didn’t cut and paste a press release, she gave us a chance to ask the CMO at one of the world’s biggest brands a question and have him answer our question on video.  Gold!

4 – She created a pitch that was so useful to the bloggers she reached out to that they dropped everything to be involved.

5 – The pitch created insanely useful content for the bloggers, and free publicity for the client.  A huge win-win.  In fact, the post I wrote (linked above) ended up being one of the most popular posts I have ever written because the CMO gave me a huge nugget in his answer that created a story in and of itself.  Click the link to see what he said that was so interesting.

 

The bottom line in pitching bloggers is that your response rate goes up the more work you put into making sure your pitch is relevant to the bloggers you pitch.  Yes, that means spending some time reading blogs and actually attempting to learn something about the bloggers you pitch.  You’ll thank me when your response rate is 10X better than the competition.

UPDATE: Just checked my email, 1 min after I published this post, I received an email from someone I’d never heard of, all the email contains is a cut and paste of a press release.  Flagged as Spam.

by

The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 17: Customer Acquisition vs Customer Cultivation

TheCommunicationGap

This is a graph I drew to give you a visual representation of The Communication Gap between most companies and their customers.  The blue shading on the left represents the desired level of communication from the company’s side.  The company wants to communicate with almost all new and potential customers.  The number of existing customers the company wants to communicate with falls sharply, and the company makes little effort to communicate with its customers that have some brand affinity, and its brand advocates.

On the right side, the red shading represents that customers that do want to communicate with the company.  It’s almost all brand advocates, some customers with brand affinity, then a sliver of existing and new customers.

But note the purple sliver at the bottom.  This represents customers that want to communicate with the company, and that the company is communicating with them.  Also note that the company tries to communicate with its customers when they aren’t looking for communication (new and existing customers) then when they are wanting to connect (when they develop some affinity for the brand and become advocates), the company stops trying to talk to them.  It’s completely backwards and creates a huge communication gap in the middle of the customer’s journey from being a new customer to becoming an advocate.

When it comes to communication there’s a massive disconnect between what customers want and what companies are giving them.  The reason why is because companies are focused on customer acquisition when they should be focused on customer cultivation.

And that’s what I’ll be talking about during this episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show!

Show Notes:

0:40 – The disconnect between customer acquisition and customer cultivation.

1:00 – Companies focus on acquiring new customers, but do little to cultivate existing customers.

1:30 – An explanation of The Communication Gap graph, which is posted above.

4:15 – Most of us do not want to talk to brands that we have no affinity toward.  ‘Your brand is not my friend.’  But if I am an advocate for your brand, I do want to connect with you.

5:00 – There needs to be a balance between focusing solely on acquiring new customers, and cultivating existing ones.  Customer cultivation helps transition existing customers into advocates for your brand.

6:10 – Can your company connect with me on a bigger level than simply your product?

6:40 – Notice how the orange shaded area almost perfectly overlaps the customers that rock stars focus on.  Rock stars do the exact opposite of companies, they focus almost solely on marketing to current fans, vs new customers.

7:45 – The Communication Gap is basically a hole where customers leave you.

9:00 – The value of creating a communication plan that focuses on the differing communication needs of each type of customers, to help new customers transition to eventually becoming brand advocates.

11:00 – We trust fellow customers more than we do a brand we have no connection with.

 

Here’s where you can download the episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.  Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well! Thanks for listening!

by

The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 16: Building Better Word of Mouth

Hey y’all! Welcome to another episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show.  This is the business podcast devoted to helping your company create and cultivate new fans, as well as helping you better connect with your existing fans.  Today’s episode talks about Word of Mouth, and the different types of WOM.  Did you think that all WOM, even all positive WOM is the same?  It definitely is not, and this episode talks about how WOM is different based on the customer and how to cultivate the best WOM among your fans.

Show notes:

1:00 – The business value of Word of Mouth

1:20 – Different types of Word of Mouth created by customers

1:45 – Better Word of Mouth is more effective WOM.  But what constitutes ‘better’ Word of Mouth?

3:00 – Customers that have more in-depth knowledge of your products can create better Word of Mouth about your products.

5:10 – Most companies leave their ‘high-level’ fans alone, but these fans create the best WOM, and should be encouraged.

6:10 – What can you do to improve the understanding and WOM generated by your customers that only have a basic understanding of your products and how to use them?

8:00 – There are levels to Word of Mouth. Fans that have a better understanding of your products create ‘better’ WOM.  Think of 101 level understanding creating 101 level WOM vs 401-level understanding creating 401-level WOM.

9:00 – What can you do to move the 101-level fans up to 201, then 301 then 401-level?

 

As always, #FanDamnShow’s amazing opener and closer is produced by the fantabulous Kerry O’Shea Gorgone.

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.  Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well! Thanks for listening!

 

 

by

My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For February

For every month in 2015, I’ve set specific goals for growing my blog readership, and podcast audience.  The end goal is that by December this blog will have at least 100,000 visitors for that month, and the podcast will be downloaded at least 10,000 times for December.  Every month I am going to write a post like this recapping how I did in the previous month, and share any lessons I have learned.  The goal is to help you learn how to build a blog readership and podcast audience as I do.

First, here were my goals for February:

Blog – At least 54,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 850 downloads

Now right off the bat I have to admit that I forgot when setting both goal amounts that there were only 28 days in February.  Oops!  My goals for last month should have been about the same as January.

Which is part of the reason why I didn’t hit either goal.

Let’s start by looking at how the blog did in February:

My total blog traffic for February was 50,225 visitors, averaging 1,794 visitors a day.  My average daily traffic in January was 1,735 visitors a day, so traffic increased slightly last month.

Here’s where my traffic came from in February:

Organic Search – 81.3%

Direct – 11.3%

Referral – 4.1%

Social – 3%

Email – 0.3%

 

Organic Search traffic went down slightly, and everything else went up slightly.  I am hoping that trend continues in March.

Posts written in February – 10.  My goal was to have at least 2 posts a week, so I hit that goal.  For March, I’m going to bump that goal up to at least 12 posts and 3 a week.

One of the things I’ve noticed about having goals for the blog for this year is that it’s forcing me to pay more attention to all the details.  Also, it’s prompting me to always look for ways to improve the experience here, which will improve the numbers.  One of the nagging issues on this blog has been slow load times. Up until a couple of weeks ago, it typically took over 6 seconds to load a page on this blog.  I’ve known for a long time that such a high load time was creating a subpar experience for many visitors, and a lot of people were probably leaving before the blog even loaded.

There were two main reasons for the slow load times:

1 – I was using Godaddy’s ‘Economy’ hosting.  The economy hosting is shared, meaning that it’s stuck on a server with hundreds if not thousands of other sites, which creates longer load times for all those sites.  A big reason why I never switched to a faster hosting method was because I was scared to death of the migration process.  I was afraid it would break my blog.

2 – The 2nd reason for the long load times were all the plugins I had.  Plugins do two things for your blog: They add functionality, and add load time.  So every plugin is a tradeoff between increased functionality for you and your readers, and increased load time.  I had always focused on the increased functionality, and ignored the increased load times.

 

So a couple of weeks ago I put my foot down and decided that it was time to get the load times for this blog down drastically.  When I started checking with a site called Pingdom, the blog was loading in a range of 5.5 to 6.5 seconds.  So an average of about 6 seconds to load.  Insanely high.  Here’s what I did to lower load times:

1 – I switched from Godaddy’s Economy Hosting to Managed WordPress Hosting.  This immediately shaved 1 to 1.5 seconds off the load times.

2 – I disabled any unnecessary or redundant plugins.  This saved 0.5 to 1 second of load time.

3 – I added the WP Smush.It plugin.  This plugin optimizes the images used on your blog.  More images means more time to load, and this plugin strips out any uncessary bits and bytes to make the images smaller and quicker to load.  This lowered the load time by about half a second.

4 – I turned off pingbacks.  This saved another 0.5 to 1 second off load times.

5 – I disabled the Jetpack plugin.  This saved another 0.5 to 1 second off load times.  This one was a big tradeoff.  The Jetpack plugin had a lot of functionality I needed, but that load time of an extra second or so was a lot.

6 – I changed the frontpage option to only display 3 posts instead of 7.  7 posts means more stuff to load, and longer load times.  This saved 0.5 to 1 second.

 

So at this point when the smoke had cleared, here’s how fast my blog was loading:

SIteSpeed4My blog had gone from loading in over 6 seconds, to loading in 3 tenths of a second!  That is freaking FAST.  Now that was with almost no plugins other than the bare essentials activated.  I wanted to strip out all of the fat, and get the blog loading as fast as possible.  I also wanted to give myself some leeway, because I would need to add a few plugins back, and those would bump the load times back up a bit.

The first problem I noticed was, I had no sharing buttons here.  Gotta have sharing buttons.  So I started researching sharing plugins, I specifically wanted a plugin that would add sharing buttons before the post, but also I wanted a plugin that wouldn’t add much load time.  I quickly discovered the Premium plugin Social Warfare.  The plugin got very good reviews, and I noticed that the developers promised ‘virtually instant load times’.  So I went with it and am using it on the blog now.  I really like it so far, and I’ve noticed it added about 3 to 7 tenths of a second of load time to my blog.  Which is pretty low.

So at this point, my blog is consistently loading in 0.7 to 1 second.  Very fast.  So what’s an ideal load time?  It really depends and you’ll hear a lot of different answers.  Personally, I think your goal should be to get your load time down to 2 seconds.  If it only takes 2 seconds to load your blog, most visitors probably won’t even notice that.  But if it takes you 3 seconds or longer, that can quickly become an irritant.  You can use Pingdom to check your site’s load time.  Don’t fret if your load time is over 3 seconds, the odds are you can make some very simple and quick changes to your blog to get that load time down by at least a second.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for February      

I made the same mistake in setting my podcast goal for February as I did with my blog: I forgot that there were only 28 days in February.

Goal for February – At least 850 downloads.

Actual number of downloads for February – 574

Oops.  This wasn’t even close.

Here’s the podcast daily downloads over the last 6 months:

PodcastNumbersFeb

Now, there’s an explanation for why the numbers were down in February for podcast downloads.  In January I started to notice that my laptop’s keyboard was acting funky.  By early February it had gotten really bad, so I decided it was time to get a new laptop.  I found a Dell laptop that had all the bells and whistles I needed, but the problem is that it was a brand new model, and as such it wasn’t available at retailers yet.  The only option was to have Dell build me one, which would take 2-3 weeks to build and ship to me.  Ok fine, I ordered it.  And sure enough, a couple of days after I ordered it, my old Dell laptop officially kicked the bucket.  Which meant I couldn’t publish new podcast episodes until I got the new laptop.  So I was only able to publish two new podcast episodes in February.  I have the new laptop now so starting this week I’ll have regular episodes up again.  But this taught me a valuable lesson: Have a few episodes of the podcast recorded ahead of time to avoid a problem like this in the future.

So that’s how my February went here on the blog and with my podcast, The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show. My goals for March are:

Blog – At least 58,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,100 downloads.

I’ll share my results with you in one month!

by

It’s Not About Social Media ROI, It’s About Marketing ROI

SocialMEdiaSmallLet’s say you are the CMO at your company, and the CEO is demanding that sales for Product A increase by 10% above your projections for the next fiscal year.  He also says that you can only make one change to the marketing mix.

 

Would you:

A – Move billboard placements in Product A’s Top 10 markets from the interstate to downtown locations?

B – Launch a company blog designed to better explain the features, qualities and benefits of Product A?

C – Divert budget to more television ads designed to show why Product A is a better fit for customers than the competitor’s Product B?

D – Move all grocery end-cap displays in Wal-Mart up to the front registers?

 

In Marketing 101 class we learned about the AIDA model of consumer behavior.

A = Awareness

I = Interest

D = Desire

A = Action

 

Awareness leads to Interest leads to Desire leads to Action.  Note that the purchasing happens at the Action portion of this model.  So if we are looking at the individual components of a marketing plan, how do you define the ROI of tactics that comprise the Awareness portion of your plan?  In theory, you cannot, because customers aren’t ready to buy at this stage of their purchase journey.  This is why you create a comprehensive marketing plan that makes customers Aware of your product, that builds Interest in the product, then a Desire to Act.

When the smoke clears, you have a marketing plan that you can judge the ROI of.  But it doesn’t make sense to judge the individual tactics of a comprehensive plan from a ROI perspective.  No matter how much it wants to, your billboard on Highway 23 can’t close a sale for you.  At best, it can make your customers Aware of your product and make them Interested and increase their Desire to buy, but it can’t convert on the Action of buying.

So what does that mean for you, the social media manager at your company that is trying to explain and perhaps even defend why your company should be using social media to connect with customers?

It starts with having an honest discussion about what social media can and cannot do for your business.  First, social media has never worked well as a channel to facilitate direct sales.  Social media works best as an interaction channel, as a way for people to engage each other and be social.  Direct sales isn’t an activity that functions well in the middle of social conversations online anymore than pitching strangers chatting on the front porch on Sunday afternoon does.

So if social media works well as a channel for people to have interactions and discussions and to share content, then your business needs to find its value within those functions of the channel.  You want to be aware of how your current and potential customers prefer to use these tools, and work within those constraints.

What type of interactions do they prefer?  And with who?  With your brand, or with fellow customers?

What type of content are they creating?

What type of content are they sharing?

The idea is that you want to use social media in a way to connect with your customers and create value for them.  You create value for your customers by enhancing their experience via social media tools.  By giving them the type of high-quality content they are looking for and need.  By helping to facilitate the type of interactions they want and need (Hint: They don’t want to be sold to, they do want help dealing with a problem setting up your new laptop they just bought).

The best way to achieve your goals for social media is to help customers achieve their goals for social media.  Understand why your customers are on social and you will understand how you can create value for them via these channels.  That value will enhance your overall marketing results, which will lead to an increase in marketing ROI.

by

‘Badass: Making Users Awesome’ is the Best Business Book You Can Buy in 2015

I could not be more excited to be holding this book!  Badass: Making Users Awesome is the best business book you can buy in 2015.

Period.

Badass starts with a simple challenge: Create a bestselling product.  Without marketing, without competing on price.  The book challenges you to think about what makes a successful product?  Why did this social media book become a New York Times Bestseller and this one did not?  Why did this software suite from Adobe sell a million copies while this one from Roxio was a bomb?  What makes Product A successful while Product B (that has the same or very similar features, and pricing) is not?

“The key attributes of sustained success don’t live in the product.  The key attributes live in the user.” (page 21)

Bam! It’s not about making a better product, it’s about making a better user of your product!  It’s about making your users and customers be Badass, and Kathy teaches you exactly how.  Not only does she teach you how to create badass users, she shows you why so many companies fail to create badass users.  She shows you how the new user becomes the badass user.  How they change along the way, how the way they use your product changes, and how they view that product and your brand changes.

Perhaps the biggest marketing takeaway from this book is the difference between how most companies market their product versus how most customers want to use your product.  Most marketing is focused on the product, or tool.  But most customers are more interested in what the tool allows them to do.  It’s not about the DSLR camera, it’s about me being able to take amazing pictures.  It’s not about the chemical composition of the carnauba wax, it’s about me being able to give my red car that gorgeous ‘wet’ wax look.  The best marketing isn’t about your products, it’s about the larger context that your products lives in, that I am passionate about.

That passion is what can drive me to be Badass.  And if your company is creating Badass users, it’s ensuring its long-term success.

Now, a word about the actually book itself: This is a simply gorgeous book.  First, it’s printed on very slick and high-quality paper, which feels far superior to the standard newsprint-y paper stock that most business books use.  Second, the book has literally hundreds of visuals, graphs and charts that enhance learning, and add to the value of the book.  Here’s an example:

DSCN1686-1024x768
So colorful and a very welcome break from the walls of text you see in too many books.  And for fans of Kathy’s Creating Passionate Users blog, these graphs and visuals are right in line with what we’ve come to expect from Kathy.

As you know from reading this blog, I was thrilled to have Kathy agree to write the foreword for my first book, Think Like a Rock Star.  What you may not know is that Kathy co-created the Head First series of programming books, published by O’Reilly.  This series has been so successful that Kathy’s books have sold over one million copies.  Yeah.  A big reason why these books have been so successful is because of how Kathy organizes the information in her books to help facilitate learning.  It even includes worksheets and spaces for you to create your own formula for who your ideal Badass user would be, what they would be able to accomplish if they were Badass, etc. She was kind enough to help me greatly with the structure of Think Like a Rock Star in this regard, but of course she did a much better job with her own book 🙂  Which is one reason why Badass is going to be a hit.  The bottom line is if you bought and enjoyed Think Like a Rock Star, you absolutely will love Badass, probably moreso.

“You have the chance to help people become more badass not only at using your tool within a meaningful context, but badass at life.” (page 282)

Word. Badass:Making Users Awesome is the best $20 you can invest in your business this year.  Buy it right now at Amazon.

(Disclosure: Kathy is a friend and so are you.  I believe in helping my friends be awesome so that’s why I want you to buy this book.  Now, go!)

by

What You Can Learn From My Record Blog Traffic Yesterday

I am constantly preaching the need for bloggers to have Google Analytics on their blog during #Blogchat.  A big reason why is so you can track changes in your blog, good and bad, so that you can understand why the change happened.

Yesterday this blog had 2,235 visitors, which is about 90 more than the previous high for one day.  What I want to do is walk you through the stats in Google Analytics to figure out why this happened, and also give you some insights into how you can do the same for your posts.

One thing I do every day is a comparison between the current day’s traffic and the traffic from one week ago.  For example, today I’ll track the current day’s traffic (Thursday) and also compare the hourly traffic against last Thursday’s traffic.  This gives me an easy way to see if traffic is doing better or worse than it was a week ago.  Here’s what that comparison looked like for yesterday compared to a week earlier:

HourlyGAtraffic
 That’s a really strong graph as it shows that traffic for yesterday (blue) was higher than the previous Wednesday during every hour yesterday except for the final one of the day.  This is what you want to see, because it indicates that traffic is growing week to week.

But the traffic last Wednesday was 1,785, whereas yesterday it was 2,235.  That’s a 25% increase, and while I’m thrilled with that jump, I want to figure out why it happened.

So let’s put on our cyber detective hats and dive deeper into the blog’s stats.  The first place I’ll start is by taking the above data (yesterday’s traffic vs the previous Wednesday’s) and segment that traffic into channels.  You can find this in Google Analytics by clicking Acquisition>All Traffic>Channels:

ChannelTraffic1

Three things immediately jump off this graph to me:

1 – Note that there was a BIG jump in search traffic.

2 – While the number of visitors that arrived at the blog from an organic search increased, the percentage of overall traffic that came from search actually went DOWN.

3 – There was a BIG jump in traffic from Social.

 

Now, the big jump in search along with the big jump in social is interesting to me.  It increased by 14% week to week, which is much higher than it normally does.  I want to play a hunch and check out the sources of the Social traffic.  So I click on Social and it will show me which social sites drove traffic to my blog yesterday and a week ago yesterday:

SocialTrafficA-ha! So almost all of the surge in Social traffic yesterday vs a week ago was actually coming from just Twitter.  This is my suspicion: As people were sharing my content yesterday on Twitter, it was leading to more links to my content being seeded higher in search results on Google. So the better my content did on Twitter yesterday, it resulted in it also doing better in search results on Google.  That would explain why search traffic spiked because overall the two traffic sources that accounted for almost all of the overall traffic bump yesterday were Google and Twitter.  Perhaps this is a result of Google indexing tweets into search results?

But I still don’t know if any content in particular was driving the increase in traffic.  That’s what I really want to know.  So back to Google Analytics, I click Behavior>Site Content>All Pages:

PostsGA
Double A-Ha! The 4th and 5th most viewed posts yesterday were both new posts I wrote this week.  And a big chunk of the overall growth in traffic can be tied back to these 2 posts (288 new visitors).

This also gives me important insights into the type of content that resonates with my readers.  And since I’ve already looked at the channel data, I know that most of the increase probably came from Twitter, so really I know that these two topics likely resonate with my followers on Twitter.

And the beauty of this is I can come back tomorrow and do the same analysis on this post, and compare how it does today vs how the above two posts from earlier this week did.  BTW, a big reason why I wanted to write this post is because I have been doing these type of analysis for a while now, and I know that posts that do a deep-dive into actual numbers are popular with readers here.  Another advantage to knowing your blog’s stats!

The point in all this is to invest time in understanding your blog’s stats so you can improve your blogging efforts and efficiency.  If I hadn’t looked at my blog’s stats I would have little idea that yesterday was a record-setting traffic day or more importantly why it was a record-setting traffic day.  Now I know, and that knowledge will help me improve my blogging efforts moving forward.  Just as it will for you if in you invest the time in understanding your blog’s stats.

by

Surprise! Facebook Has Changed the Rules Again For Brands

Facebook has once again tweaked its News Feed algorithm and the change will alter how often content from brands appears in News Feeds from people that have Liked that brand’s page.  This post seems to write itself 2-3 times a year, doesn’t it?

The newest changes, which rolled out last month and were announced last November, flip the script on brands.  Previously, brands were told that they needed to add photos to their updates to increase engagement and visibility in Facebook’s News Feed.

Now?  It’s the opposite, content with photos has the lowest reach.

Yeah.  This is a big reason why I am always telling you to first plant seeds in the gardens you own.  Invest in your website and blog first, not social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.  Because those sites can change the rules on you whenever they want, and Facebook is the worst offender here.  What irks me most about this latest change is that it flies in the face of the advice that companies are hearing about social media.  Companies have been taught for years that pictures drive engagement.  That adding a relevant image to your content will enhance its value and the engagement around it.  Now, Facebook is saying that pictures are penalized, if anything.  This becomes a big problem for the companies that focus most of their social media efforts on Facebook because they will be learning what Facebook wants them to know about improving engagement on Facebook versus about what actually drives the engagement of social media content.

Facebook can be a wonderful complement to your existing online marketing efforts.  Unfortunately, many companies use its Facebook page as a replacement for having a blog or even a website.  And if they later decide to launch a blog or website, they can take the bad lessons learned on Facebook, and apply it to their blog.  Like writing posts without images.  Or only publishing ‘cute’ videos of kids falling in the snow and wondering why that’s not driving engagement on the company blog for an industrial lubricant supplier.

In a perfect world, Facebook’s goals would be aligned with your company’s goals.  Facebook would want to show and teach you how to create content that is more engaging and valuable to your customers.  But Facebook is now a publicly-traded company.  Facebook’s goals are increasing revenue and profits.  That’s likely a big reason why it’s moving toward putting more value on videos.  Because watching videos means you stay on Facebook even longer.  And as time spent on site goes up, Facebook can report that to shareholders as a sign of growth and to advertisers as leverage to raise ad rates.

Facebook’s goals are to make Facebook better for Facebook, not for your company.  Your company is on its own, so plan accordingly.

by

Google is Now Indexing Tweets in Search Results, What it Means For You

Google’s love affair with Twitter is back on.  Previously, Google had indexed tweets from Twitter in its search results, but that deal ended in 2011.  Here’s a post I wrote back in 2011 that examined how this process worked.  Earlier this month it was reported that Google would begin adding tweets back to search results sometime in the first half of 2015, but it looks like it’s already underway.

Here’s a screenshot from a google search I did for the name of my marketing podcast.  Note the 6th and 7th results on the first page are tweets I left:

FanDamnTweetsGoogleThis means that content you create on Twitter (tweets) is now being indexed into search results alongside posts that appear on your blog or white papers on your website.

It also means that you now have another channel to seed your content into Google search results.  One of the issues that many blogging businesses face is a difficulty in getting content to rank high in Google results.  It typically can take years to build a business blog to the point where content ranks well in search results.

But if you have a large following on Twitter, that could mean that your tweets rank higher in search results than blog posts you write on the same topics.  You can leverage your following on Twitter to help build your audience for your blog.

Another way to use Twitter to help your blog (and this has nothing to do with Google indexing tweets) is to leverage your business discussions on Twitter as potential topics for your business blog.  I am constantly doing this, I will use Twitter as sort of a ‘sounding board’ to see which topics are important and interesting to others.  Participating and even lurking in Twitter chats is a great way to do this.  By following a Twitter chat that’s focused on topics that are relevant to your blog, you can get a better sense for which topics interest potential readers of your blog.  Which can lead to more content ideas for your blog, which will make it easier to hit your content creation goals.

Have you noticed that tweets are showing up in Google results?  Has it impacted any search terms your blog has ranked for in the past?