MackCollier.com

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How Much Money Should You Spend On Your Business Blog?

BlogMouse-300x225The topic of #Blogchat last Sunday was “If You Could Spend $500 on Making Your Blog Better, What Would You Buy?”  It brought about an interesting discussion and here’s the transcript.  I wanted to add my thoughts because anything related to money and social media is a topic that a lot of companies have questions about.

First, let’s tier purchases that your business could make on improving its blog:

The Essentials These are the items you should invest in from launch.

1 – Dedicated/Upgraded hosting.  If you are running on WordPress, go with the self-hosted version and pick dedicated hosting.  Your experience will be more seamless, your site should run faster, and updates will be done automagically.  Many companies are now offering dedicated WordPress hosting, and you can typically get it for anywhere from $15-$100 a month, with price being mostly a function of number of monthly visitors you will have.  For many blogs, $15-25 a month will get it done.  I use GoDaddy’s dedicated WordPress hosting and its $20 a month and this site gets around 40,000 visitors a month.

2 – Sucuri Security.  They are currently offering complete malware protection and removal, plus firewall for $199 a year.  I went with them in March of 2013 to deal with a malware issue that had all but crippled this blog.  It took a while to get cleaned out but once they did I haven’t had a single problem with security on the blog.  Trust me, the money is worth it just for the piece of mind.

3 – A Premium Blog Theme.  Premium themes give you more flexibility in the design and functionality of your blog.  A custom-built blog can easily cost $5,000-$10,000, so this can be a nice compromise.  This site runs on Thesis, which is great if you are comfortable with coding, CSS and love tinkering with code.  It can be a bear for the novice, though.  There are dozens of premium themes to consider, here’s a nice list.  Most range in price from $50-75 for a one time fee.

So the total price for the Essentials is going to be around $50-75 for the theme, and a monthly fee of $35 or so for the dedicated hosting and Sucuri.  That will give you a nice foundation for your blog and for most businesses, that will be all you’ll ever need on the design/backend.

Now let’s look at the second tier:

Upping Your Content Creation/Strategy Game  

1 – Audio/Video equipment.  As more businesses are moving blog management in-house, it pays to start investing in the equipment that will help you more easily create content.  Specifically, you’re talking a camera for shooting pictures and video, and a microphone for recording audio such as interviews and podcasts.  Now if you aren’t interested in recording video, and just want to shoot pictures, if your bloggers have newer smartphones, the cameras on those will probably be fine for snapping shots as they are out and about that can later be used with posts.  But if you’re wanting to shoot video, it makes sense to invest in a decent camera and then you can not only shoot video, but take better pictures as well.

Next, if you want to do a podcast or create audio (without video), then you need a decent microphone.  The microphone I use for The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show is the Rode Podcaster USB mic.  It’s an excellent mic and many of the top podcasters use it, such as Kerry O’Shea Gorgone on the Marketing Smarts Podcast.  Its a dynamic mic, which means it picks up the person talking directly into the mic and tends to not pick up as much background noise as a condenser mic.  A lot of the less expensive mics you’ll find are condenser mics, and these can work fine, if you are recording in a very controlled environment with little background noise.  But if you are going to be recording in an environment where other people will be, go with the dynamic.  Plus, I believe the sound quality is better.  The Rode I purchased came from Amazon as part of a podcasting kit for $350.  If you want to just get the mic, it is usually around $200, plus you’ll need at least a desk stand for it, which you can get for under $20. Plus it has a 10-year warranty!

2 – Attending Conferences/Webinars.  These are a great way to get tips and ideas for content creation and strategy.  Of course, prices vary widely, quality webinars you can view over the internet are typically anywhere from $50-$150, whereas total expenses for a conference trip could top $2,000.00.  The big advantage to attending a conference is that you get to talk to other attendees that are having the same issues you are, so it can really help you improve your own efforts by comparing notes with others.

3 – Blog/Content Marketing Strategy Audit.  A professional Blog/Content Marketing Strategy Audit is a great way to take your blogging and content marketing efforts to the next level.  It gives your blogging efforts clarity and it always helps to bring in an outside source to give a second opinion and to potentially catch opportunities that you may be missing.  It’s definitely an investment but the investment should also help you bring clarity to the effectiveness of your blog and how it benefits your business.

 

All of these options should be viewed as investments in your business blog.  As such, you should consider the expense, and then consider what benefits your business will gain from that expense to decide if the investment is worth the money.

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For July

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 July:

Blog – At least 75,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 3,000 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For July

My blog traffic in July was 38,125 visitors, averaging 1,229 visitors a day.  In June, the blog’s traffic was 40,721, averaging 1,357 a day.  So an overall decrease of 6%.  This is mostly due to the fact that I only posted 9 posts last month, and only 3 of those were new, original posts that weren’t associated with #Blogchat or #FanDamnShow or this update.  The goal is to have at least 2 such posts a week, so I missed that goal by 5 posts.  Writing those additional posts would have probably given me a slight traffic increase over the previous month.

Here’s how each category of traffic did in July vs June:

Search traffic – Down 1.05%

Direct traffic – Down 5.13%

Referral – Up 6.71%

Social – Down 37.08%

Other – Up 36.87%

Email – Down 87.59%

 

A mostly mixed bag but I am pleased that Search traffic was barely down, and Referral traffic was up for the 3rd month in a row.  Social being down was in large part due to my writing fewer posts last month.  Plus I think some of the overall decline in traffic could be due to blog readership falling a bit in the Summer.  It will be interesting to see how August does vs July.

One thing I haven’t really talked about so far with this series is the value of new content you create and the impact that new posts can have on your blog.  Here’s the Top 10 most viewed pages on this blog for July (according to Google Analytics):

BlogJuly

 

So only 1 post written in July ranked in the Top 10 for views in July, and that post was about my job search.   I want to see if I can change that for August, hopefully have 2-3 of the posts I write this month rank in the Top 10.

 

Podcast Numbers and Overview for July

The goal for July was at least 3,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 3,662 downloads in July. That was actually down sharply from June, but I only recorded one new episode in July, aired on July 1st.  I got busy with a lot of side projects and the job search, so I plan on getting back on a weekly schedule starting with this week.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastJanJulyThe Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually topped 20,000 lifetime downloads last month and has a chance to top 25,000 downloads this month.  For the last few months the podcast has been coasting comfortably and easily hitting monthly goals.  That’s about to change as the monthly goals are about to take big jumps each month as we’re now in August and the goal by the end of the year is to hit 10,000 downloads in December.  This month the goal jumps by 1,000, up to 4,000 downloads total.

 

So those are my blog and podcast results for July.  Here’s my goals for August:

Blog traffic – At least 80,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 4,000 downloads

These were the goals I set for both at the start of the year.  So it looks like the blog’s goal will be all but impossible to hit, and it looks like the podcast’s goal is very reachable.

I’ll be back in one month to share my results for August!

 

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results for June

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 June:

Blog – At least 70,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,500 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For June

My blog traffic in June was 40,721 visitors, averaging 1,357 visitors a day.  In May, the blog’s traffic was 39,000, averaging 1,258 a day.  So a slight increase of 4%, which reverses the trend of the last few months.  I made some backend changes to the blog back in February, and since that time search traffic has decreased considerably, which was a big driver in the fall in overall traffic.  The hope has been that eventually search traffic would rise back to at least previous levels and bring overall traffic levels with it.

Here’s how each category of traffic did in June vs May:

Search traffic – Down 4.82%

Direct traffic – Up 19.85%

Email – Up 8,216%

Referral – Up 5.12%

Social – Up 86.61%

 

As you can see, search traffic was actually down again, but every other major source of traffic was up.  Email and Social had huge gains, and that was due primarily to the popularity of this post: Don’t Sweat the Technique: The Rock Star’s Guide to Content Creation, Content Marketing and Promotion.  This was by far the most popular post I wrote last month, and was a big driver in the jump in Social traffic.  An interesting byproduct of writing that post was that as it gained popularity on Twitter and Facebook, it caught the attention of Moz, who included it in their email roundup of interesting posts, and that generated about another 2,000 visitors via email.  So if I didn’t write that one post, the entire outlook for the month looks much different, traffic is probably down about 5% from May versus being up 4%.  It’s a testament to the potential power of every single post you write, and a good reminder to me as well.

Here’s how weekly search traffic has looked through June:

SearchThroughJune

You can see it was very high through mid-February, then the bottom fell out.  It continues to slightly decrease, I was hopeful that had ended earlier this month, last week was actually up about 10% and I thought the fever had finally broke.  But this week it’s back down slightly, so on we go.

I wrote 10 posts in June, which was about 2-3 lower than my monthly goals.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for June

While blog traffic was down again month, podcast downloads again did very well in June.

The goal for June was at least 2,500 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 4,296 downloads in June. That was actually down slightly from May, but still far ahead of the goals for June.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastDLsJan-June

 

The numbers were again strong in June.  One episode was unique, as I welcomed the first guest to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show as Kerry Gorgone joined on the June 17th episode to discuss the legal concerns of social media.  This episode is already the most downloaded one, with well over 2,000 downloads, about 400 more than 2nd place.  Obviously Kerry was quite popular as was her topic, but I also think that having a guest helped make the episode more popular so I will look for ways to incorporate more guests into future episodes.

So those are my blog and podcast results for June.  Here’s my goals for July:

Blog traffic – At least 75,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 3,000 downloads

These were the goals I set for both at the start of the year.  So it looks like the blog’s goal will be all but impossible to hit, and it looks like the podcast’s goal will be all but impossible to miss.

I’ll be back in one month to share my results for July!

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results for May

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 May:

Blog – At least 65,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,000 downloads

My blog traffic in May was 39,000 visitors, averaging 1,258 visitors a day.  In April, the blog’s traffic was 40,980, averaging 1,366 a day.  So a slight decrease, but not nearly as bad as it has been the last few months.  If you’ve been following these monthly updates, you know that in February I made some backend changes to the blog.  I switched from Godaddy’s shared to managed WordPress hosting, and I deleted a ton of plugins.  The upside to these moves is that site performance, especially load times, was greatly improved.  Avg load times for the site went from about 6 seconds before, to around 2-3 seconds now.  Unfortunately, as soon as I made these changes, I noticed that traffic started dropping, especially search traffic.  Here’s how each category of traffic did in May vs April:

Search traffic – Down 3.61%

Direct traffic – Down 13.28%

Referral – Up 1.9%

Social – Down 41.67%

Other – Up 362.65%

A note: The ‘other’ traffic spiked because Google Analytics apparently moved Twitter referrals from my blog’s Social Warfare plugin from Social (Twitter) to Social Warfare, and started counting it in the Other category.  Which is why Social had a sharp decline, and Other was up sharply.  Move the Social Warfare-based referrals back to Social, and Social traffic was about flat last month.

It appears to me that search traffic has almost reached a point where it is no longer falling.  I am hopeful that once search traffic completely stops falling, that it will start increasing again.  This is what weekly search traffic looks like for January through May:

Jan-MaySearchTrafficAs you can see, search traffic has been going more or less sideways for the last few weeks.  I am hoping that this will mean a slight increase in search traffic in June over May.

BTW, what about mobile search traffic?  As you may remember, Google claimed that it was going to start using mobile-friendly sites as one of its ranking signals.  Meaning, if someone searches on a mobile device and your site is mobile-friendly, Google said it would consider that and rank your site’s content higher as a result.  Or at least not penalize your site’s content while content from a site that was NOT mobile-friendly, would be penalized.

So I made sure that Google was reading my site as mobile-friendly in time for its April 21st deadline for doing so.  So what type of jump did I see in mobile search traffic in May?  Not much, in fact I saw an increase from 10,954 mobile search traffic visitors in April, to 10,970 in May.  An increase of 16 visitors.  Definitely not the jump I was hoping for, but at least it didn’t go down!

I wrote 13 posts in May versus 12 in April.  I would like to write at least that many in June.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for May

While blog traffic was down again month, podcast downloads again did very well in May.

The goal for May was at least 2,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 4,444 downloads in May. So the number of downloads exceeded my goals by over 100%.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastDLsJan-MayThe podcast continues to do far better than I expected, so at this point as long as monthly downloads increases at all in June, I’ll be happy.

So those are my blog and podcast results for May.  Here’s my goals for June:

Blog traffic – At least 70,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,500 downloads

These were the goals I set for both at the start of the year.  So it looks like the blog’s goal will be all but impossible to hit, and it looks like the podcast’s goal will be all but impossible to miss.  Honestly I will be happy with any growth for both over May numbers at this point.

I’ll be back in one month to share my results for June!

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How Visit Philly Leverages Analytics to Improve its Content Marketing

VisitPhillyPost

In one week I will be in Gulf Shores presenting Think Like a Rock Star to a group of smart tourism professionals from the Gulf Coast.  Whenever I present to an industry-specific group, I tailor my case studies to include examples from their space.  A couple weeks ago I pinged Sheila Scarborough to ask her about any great social media case studies from the tourism industry that I might have missed.  One of the examples Sheila shared with me was a deck from Visit Philly’s Caroline Bean on how that DMO is leveraging social analytics to improve its content marketing.

I’ve included the deck below, and I love how Visit Philly is closely examining its analytics as it relates to the content they create.  They focus on three key areas:

  • Type of content.  Visit Philly examines and tracks how people react to content with certain elements, such as photos, or videos.  It knows which elements create more interest and engagement.
  • Content topics.  Which topics are more popular with readers?  Visit Philly knows because it segments its content by topic and tracks engagement levels for each.
  • User behavior.  Visit Philly knows which days are better to post content based on engagement levels.  They even take it to the next level and know what type of content will appeal to local visitors, and what appeals to ‘out of towners’.

Combine these three areas together and Visit Philly has a good idea if a piece of content will be a success before it is ever published.  Visit Philly aggressively tracks data from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Twitter Analytics.

The best part about this is that all of this is something that every company that uses social media marketing can and SHOULD be doing.  This is completely doable by your company, all it requires is putting in the work to analyze the data and improve your efforts moving forward.  As I was reading the deck below I was nodding along because so much of what Visit Philly looks at associated with the data around its content is the same things I look at for every piece of content I create as well.

Here’s one example of how this works: I checked out Visit Philly’s ‘sister site’, UWishUNu.com, and saw this post published 7 days ago.  Notice that it has 14 thousand Likes on Facebook!  In one week!

That happens because Visit Philly has put in the time and work to analyze the data around its content and knows exactly what type of content its readers want.  In fact, in the deck below they go into the strategy behind publishing that exact type of content on Facebook, and why it worked so well.  If this deck doesn’t give you the kick in the pants to get serious about letting analytics guide your content marketing, nothing will.

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For March

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 58,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,100 downloads

Let’s start out by looking at how the blog did in March.

My blog traffic in March was 48,901 visitors, averaging 1,577 a day.  In February I had 50,225 visitors and averaged 1,735 a day.  So traffic fell about 10% in March.  Yikes!

So what happened?  I need to figure out why the traffic fell, so I can then work on getting it back up.  Let’s start by going into Google Analytics and compare March’s traffic to February’s:

TrafficMarchThe blue area on the bottom is daily traffic for March, and the orange lines above it are February’s daily traffic.  I was curious to see if maybe there was one or two days in February that had a huge traffic spike that maybe could help account for why traffic was down in March.  But as you can see from this picture, traffic in March was pretty much down every day compared to February.

So next, let’s look at the traffic sources for each month.  I want to see if any particular traffic source moved up or down, as that would give me another clue as to what happened.

Search traffic – Down 13%

Direct traffic – Up 3.5%

Social traffic – Up 254%

Referral traffic – Up 4%

 

Now the picture becomes clearer.  If you remember from last month’s traffic update, I made some backend changes to the blog which were designed to primarily increase load times.  And it did, I culled a lot of plugins and made some tweaks to reduce average load time here from around 6 seconds in February to around 2 seconds now.  But it appears that the changes I made also led to a decline in search traffic.  At least I think that’s what the cause of the search traffic decline is, I’m not sure.  I started noticing that search traffic was down early in the month of March, so I started promoting my posts more on social media (especially Twitter), which is why there was a big jump in social traffic.  This boost was almost enough to cover the decline in search traffic.  But either way, I missed my blog’s goal for traffic in March badly.

I wrote 13 posts in March, which was 3 more than I wrote in February.  At this point I need to seriously consider trying to write 4 posts a week if I want to continue to push traffic upward.  I’ll have to watch that closely in April, and see what I can do about getting more posts up.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for March

After that beating that the blog took in March, I am ready for some good news.  Thankfully, The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show crushed its goals for March!

Goal for March: At least 1,100 downloads

Actual downloads: 1,547

So the podcast exceeded its March goal for downloads by 41%!  Awesome!  Here’s the podcast’s daily downloads for Jan 1st-March 31st:

PodcastMarch The inflection point seems to have been March 16th, from that point on for the rest of the month the daily downloads steadily went up.  I didn’t really do anything different in March, other than a bit more promotion of the podcast.  I think the increase is simply a function of the podcast finding its audience and resonating with listeners.  I even got a couple of sponsorship inquiries in March!  As a result I’ll be getting up a sponsorship page in a few days for The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show.

So those are my blog traffic and podcast audience results for March.  Here’s my goals for each in April:

Blog – At least 62,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,500 downloads

As you can see from this post, it will be a hike to reach my blog’s goal, but it looks like with the growth the podcast has shown, 1,500 downloads should be within reach for April.

I’ll be back in one month to share my results!

 

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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.

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For January

Hey y’all!  So last month I mentioned that I had set specific monthly goals for growing both my traffic here, and the number of downloads to my podcast.  What I’m going to do is every month this year I will give you an update letting you know if I hit my goals for the previous month, and also letting you know what my goals are for the current month.  I’ll also share with you the most important lessons I learned over the past month. I want to do this to hold myself accountable to the goals I’ve set, but to also give you a way to learn from I’m doing.  So many people and companies want to know how to grow its blog readership, and podcast audience.  This year we’ll look at my efforts to do both.

First, here were my goals for January:

Blog – Traffic of at least 50,000 visitors.

Podcast – At least 750 downloads.

 

Breakdown of My Blog Traffic

My blog traffic for January was 53,783!  So I comfortably hit my blogging goal for January!  Pretty excited about that.

Posts written – 12 (At least 2 every week, which was my goal)

Most popular post written in January (based on views) – The Most Boring Answer to the ‘How Do I Build More Traffic to My Blog?’ Question

Detailed Analysis of Traffic Sources

Here’s where my traffic came from in January:

Organic Search – 83.46%

Direct – 9.15%

Referral – 4.19%

Social – 2.93%

Email – 0.19%

Other – 0.08%

Two things jump out to me from these numbers:  For me, organic search is way too high, and social is way too low.  I would like to see search fall to around 70% and Social rise to 10-15%.  I just worry when my traffic is that dependent on one source.

Something else that’s interesting, check out the numbers for time spent on site:

Average time a visitor spends on this blog – 47 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from search spends on this blog – 41 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from social spends on this blog – 71 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from Twitter spends on this blog – 74 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from Facebook spends on this blog – 73 seconds

Interesting, huh?  A visitor coming from a social media site spends about 80% more time on the site versus a visitor coming from search.  This suggests that the search visitor is just coming to get something and leave, while the social visitor is more likely to look around a bit.

Also, I’m noticing that the engagement numbers I am seeing on Twitter are surprisingly low.  According to Twitter, even though I have over 50,000 followers, most of my tweets are seen by less than 1,000 people.  Yikes!  I’ll probably be spending a bit more time on Google Plus to see if I can raise social traffic and engagement there, since I have a much larger network there versus Facebook or LinkedIn.

Now my goal for February is to hit 54,000 visitors.  This looks like it should be easy since I almost did that in January, but don’t forget that this month only has 28 days.  In fact I am currently on pace to only hit 50,000 visitors for the month.  So even if I miss my goal for this month I’m not too worried due to it being a short month.  However,  I am going to try to get back to writing 3 posts a week starting next week.  Just in case!

Podcast Numbers and Overview 

If you listened to this week’s episode of #FanDamnShow you know I already did a breakdown of how the podcast did in Jan, and my key takeaways.  Please check out that episode if the podcast stuff is what you are interested in.

Goal for January – At least 750 downloads

Actual number of downloads for January – 737

I missed my goal by 13 freaking downloads!  Ugh!  But still very close and my goals for the podcast growth was really aggressive.  For reference, the podcast had 133 downloads for all of December, and 737 in January.  Still, a massive jump.

Here’s daily downloads for August 1st, 2014 through January 31st, 2015:

PodcastTraffic

As you can see, very low daily downloads, typically less than 10 a day, until the end of December and through January on the right.  That’s when I started putting out new episodes on a weekly basis.  From August 1st through December 29th, I put out 3 new episodes of the podcast.  From December 30th through January 31st, I put out five new episodes of the podcast, one every week.  If you are wanting to build an audience for your podcast, consistency is key.  Putting up a new episode on a regular schedule is vital to your show’s success, as this graph proves.

Two important lessons I learned from doing the podcast in January:

1 – It’s very important to script out the flow of each episode before recording it.  I didn’t do this for the first couple of episodes in January, and I noticed my thoughts were kinda all over the map.  When I started writing down a script, just the key points I wanted to talk about and in the order I wanted to talk about them, it really helped the flow of the episodes, and it made it much easier for me to keep my thoughts organized.

2 – It’s very important to thank the people that are promoting your show.  What I noticed was that each week people were promoting the show for me, especially on Twitter and Facebook.  So I made a point of doing a shoutout to them on each show, then I let them know I did so after the episode went up.  Just a small way to say ‘Thank You’, but everyone loves to be appreciated, right?

So that’s how my January went, and what I learned.  Again my goals for February are:

Blog – At least 54,000 visitors.

Podcast – At least 850 downloads.

I’ll be back here in a month to let you know how I did!

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My Content Creation Goals For 2015

One of the areas I struggle with every year is creating a consistent stream of content, especially here on this blog.  Invariably, at the first of the year I have more time to post because work is slower, and then when work picks up in the Spring, Summer and Fall months, I put the blog and really all of my social media activity on the backburner.

I bet you are the same way, right?  When we’re busy with work it just makes more sense to focus ON the work, right?  I’m the same way, but every year I watch how my blog will start out strong for the first 2-3 months of the year then lose momentum as I stop posting due to being busier.

I am determined not to let that happen this year, and I want you to help hold me accountable.  To this end, I have set some pretty lofty goals for both my blog, and my podcast.  I’ve decided to share these numbers with you, as well as my goals to not only hold myself accountable but also because for whatever reason a lot of bloggers don’t like to share their traffic numbers, so I wanted you to see what they can look like.

But above all else, I am hoping that this year-long project will prove this point: That it’s not enough to have a blog or a podcast, you have to consistently create content.  You can’t create content whenever you want, building an audience takes time, work and consistency.  I’ve talked to fellow bloggers and podcasters, content creators that are hammering out great content on a consistent basis, and they are killing it from an audience standpoint. I talked about the importance of not only building but sustaining momentum on #FanDamnShow last week, and am applying this thinking to my blog and the podcast this year.

So here’s what I am going to do: The first week of every month, I am going to write a post like this one, recapping whether or not I met the previous month’s goals, and talk about what the goals are for the next month.  Here’s this month’s goals and the yearly goals:

For the Blog, I want to reach 50,000 visitors for the month of January, and by December I want to be averaging at least 100,000 visitors a month.  I think I can reach January’s goal pretty easily as I am already on track to hit it, but it’s going to be tough to have at least 100,000 visitors in December.  The only way I have a chance of meeting that goal is to write new posts here every single week in 2015.

Now those sound like big numbers, and they are.  But you have to realize that I started this blog at the end of May in 2009.  So it’s almost 6 years old.  For reference, here’s the average monthly traffic here for each year:

2009 – 2,131 monthly visitors

2010 – 5,428 monthly visitors

2011 – 12,426 monthly visitors

2012 – 13,719 monthly visitors

2013 – 21,239 monthly visitors

2014 – 37,626 monthly visitors

As you can see, I will have to at least double my average monthly traffic in 2015 vs 2014 in order to reach my goals.  Not gonna be easy.

Unfortunately, my goals for the podcast are even more ‘ambitious’.  #FanDamnShow really never had a chance to get off the ground last year.  I launched it in May and then in June I had some medical issues and didn’t restart it until the end of July.  I pieced together about 4 episodes through August but then hit another wall when work got busy and I didn’t put up an episode in Sept, Oct or November.

Here’s what downloads of the podcast have looked like:

PodcastDLsA spike at the left when the podcast launched, then traffic fell in June and July when there were no new episodes.  Traffic went up a little bit in August when I got some episodes up, but really low in Sept, Oct and Nov with no new epiosdes.  But traffic did go back up over the last couple of weeks as I’ve gotten new episodes up.  My guess is if I had been able to stick with getting a new episode up weekly from launch back in May that monthly downloads would now be at a couple of thousand instead of a couple of hundred.  But I did get up an episode last week, one this week, and the goal is to put up a new episode every week throughout 2015.

As for my goal…..the goal for 2015 is to hit 10,000 monthly downloads of #FanDamnShow by December.  For reference, last month the show was downloaded 133 times.  You do the math.

Here’s this month’s goals for the blog and podcast:

Blog – 50,000 visitors

Podcast – 750 downloads

After the first 7 days, I am on pace to hit my goal for traffic for the blog, and I am almost on pace to hit my goal for downloads of the podcast.  Since the podcast is having to build its audience, I think after another 3 episodes this month of the podcast, I should be able to hit my goal.

So those are my content creation goals for 2015.  For the rest of the year during the first week of each month I’ll write a post like this one recapping how I did the previous month, and talking about my new goals for the next month.  I’ll also talk about why I did or did not reach my goals and any tweaks or changes I made or will make as a result.  Hopefully this will serve to keep me honest about my content creation goals, and also be helpful to you in building an audience for ether your blog or podcast.  Or both!

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The Art and Science of Blogging With John Wall at #Blogchat!

Here’s the transcript for this #Blogchat with John.

I’m excited to announce that John Wall will be sponsoring the next two weeks of #Blogchat on 3-9-2014 and 3-16-2014!  For John’s sponsorship, he’s come up with a pretty cool two weeks of blogging topics.

Over the next two weeks John will teach us about The Art and Science of Blogging.  This Sunday, 3-9-2014, we’ll cover the 4 Keys to the Science of Blogging:

1 – Follow the Rules

2 – Build the System

3 – Measure Everything

4 – Always Be Testing/Closing/Selling

And to prepare you for Sunday’s chat, John has written an excellent post over at his blog outlining exactly what we’ll be discussing.  Next Sunday (the 16th) John will cover the Art of Blogging.  Over the next two weeks, John will teach us about several areas of blogging that have long been requested topics by #Blogchat members, such as responsive design for your blog, design with an eye toward improving your blog’s readability, and user experience and interface.

It will be a fabulous two weeks of #Blogchat discussions to please head over and read John’s prep post on the 4 Keys to the Science of Blogging for this week and also make sure you are following him on Twitter.

Also, check out John’s book B2B Marketing Confessions on Amazon!  And finally, John is co-host of the excellent Marketing Over Coffee, one of the very best business podcasts!  See you on Twitter Sunday at 8pm Central for #Blogchat!