MackCollier.com

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Your 2,000 Word Guide to Building a Better Blog

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First, start with where you are now.   

Before you can move forward with your blog, you need to assess where you are now.  Let’s start by looking at your blog’s stats.

First, are you tracking your blog’s stats?  Hopefully you are, if not, start by adding Google Analytics to your blog today.

Assuming you have access to your blog’s stats, look at your stats for this year.  Start broadly by looking at the entire year.  Look for trends.  How is traffic doing?  How is search traffic doing?  Pageviews?  You want to see if you can find movement up or down and then try to figure out what triggered that movement.

But the main point is, you want to baseline where your blog is now so you’ll know if you are improving on your efforts as the year progresses.

What were you blogging goals for the previous year?  Did you reach them?  Look at how successful you were at reaching your goals and then decide if you need to alter anything for the year ahead.

Creating a Blogging Strategy 

Let’s assume that you either need to create a strategy for your blog, or you need to totally revamp your existing efforts.  How do you get started?

First, you need to decide what you want to accomplish with your blog.  Here’s some examples:

Increase sales

Increase brand awareness

Establish thought leadership

And those are examples for a business blog, but the same principle applies for a personal blog.  Basically ask yourself “What needs to happen in order for my blog to be a success?”  Answering this question is imperative because it’s the foundation for your blogging strategy.  

Defining Your Audience

This is critical.  You have to understand who it is you are writing for and what actions you want that audience to take.  If you’re trying to use your blog to build brand awareness, then it’s probably not a good idea to post your political rants there!

Here’s an example.  My desired audience for this blog is marketers that are interested in either working with me to help them build programs to better connect with their most passionate customers, or who want to hire me to speak or lead a workshop at their event.  In order words, my desired audience is primarily marketers at mid-sized and larger companies.  A couple of months ago a friend of mine pointed out that my content focus had gotten off center.  She helped me realize that a lot of the content I was creating at the time was actually focused on helping small businesses and solopreneurs.  maybe even personal bloggers.  I went back and checked and she was right!  I was focusing so much on creating helpful content that I lost track of the fact that the content wasn’t as helpful to my desired audience.  So you need to not only define your audience, but keep who it is you’re writing for in mind at all times, so you can create content that’s useful to them.

What Actions Do You Want Your Audience to Take?

Let’s go back to your goals for your blog:

Increase sales

Increase brand awareness

Establish thought leadership

Once you’ve figured out what your blogging goal is and who your desired audience is, you need to decide what actions you want that audience to take.  And those actions should tie back to your goals for your blog.

I’ll use this blog again as an example.  I want to connect with companies that can either hire me as a speaker, or that can hire me to help them build smarter marketing programs to connect with their most passionate customers.  So keeping this in mind, note what you see at the top of the blog on the nav bar.  The options are to learn more about me, to buy my book, to learn about hiring me to speak, and to learn about my consulting.  Then look at the top of the sidebars on the right.  At the top of the first sidebar is a form to signup for my email newsletter.  At the top of the other sidebar is my brand advocacy posts.  All of this is set up to give you information on how we can work together, or give you valuable content that can help you improve your marketing, but that also helps establish my expertise.  So either way, I am trying to move the reader closer to hiring me to either speak for or work with them.

Keep in mind that your most important real estate on your blog is Above the Fold.  This refers to the area you see when you first arrive on a blog without scrolling down.  The content at the top of your blog is always seen, so make sure that you use this space wisely.  For example if you want to drive email newsletter signups, simply moving your signup form from the bottom of your blog to the top will greatly increase your signup rate.

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What’s Your Content Strategy?

Remember earlier when we talked about defining our audience?  A big reason why was so we could craft a content strategy to connect with that audience.  Essentially, you want to think about how you can create content for your audience that is valuable to them, but that also helps them move closer to engaging in the types of actions you want them to take.  Your content needs to ultimately help you reach your larger goals for your blog.

An important distinction to keep in mind is that they type of content that you feel is valuable for your brand might not be valuable to your audience.  For example, if your goal is to increase sales, then you want to create content that moves your audience closer to buying from you.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should create content that directly promotes your brand.  Often, content that teaches your audience a skill and that empowers them will make it easier for them to buy from you.  Sometimes pointing out what your competitors are doing can work because it can help your audience trust you.  Keep in mind that blogging is a great way to facilitate selling INdirectly.  Create valuable content for your audience, and that makes it easier for them to trust you, and easier for them to trust buying FROM you.

Developing a Posting Schedule

In many ways, your posting schedule will be a function of who you are writing for and what you are trying to accomplish (see how we are building the strategy as we add each layer?).  This post goes into creating a posting schedule a bit deeper, but we’ll talk about it here as well.  Think about who your audience is and when they are most receptive to your content.  In general (and please pay attention to the end of the post), posts seem to do better in the middle of the week.  For myself and most bloggers I have talked to since 2005 (whether personal or writing for a company blog), Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days for traffic.  After that Monday, Friday, then the weekends.  So if you can only write one post a week, start running it on Tuesday or Thursday and see how it does.

Also keep in mind that certain goals will be dependent on creating more content.  For example, none of your goals for blogging will be easily reached if you can only write 1 post a month.  You need to create as much valuable content as possible.  Now ‘valuable’ is a very subjective term, but in general a good goal to shoot for is writing a minimum of one new post a week on your blog.  If you go below that it really becomes difficult to build readership.  A lot of people don’t like to talk about this, but there are several advantages to creating more content.  First, it trains you to become a better writer, quicker.  Second, search engines love sites that update their content frequently.  So new content helps your search rankings, and search traffic.  Third, new content helps build readership quicker.

So as a minimum baseline for your posting schedule, shoot for at least one post a week, ideally either on Tuesday or Thursday.  Another point to focus on is consistency of posting.  If you can only write 1 new post a week, then publish it the same day every week so your readers know when to expect it.  Not everyone will subscribe to your blog.

Tracking Your Blog’s Progress  

Did you take care of your blog stats as we discussed at the start of this post?  Good, because you’re going to need to have access to this information throughout the year.  Now comes the fun part, where we start tracking if this stuff is actually working.

First, read this post I wrote on blog analytics.  It will help you understand what you are looking for.  Go back and look at your goals for your goal.  What we want to do now is track metrics that relate to those goals.  Here’s some examples:

Stats1 These are metrics you can track to tell you that your content is helping you reach your goal of building brand awareness.  These metrics are all signals that your content is resonating with other people, and as such, that content is building a tool to help you or your brand build its reputation and awareness.

So when you start tracking metrics, pick metrics that tie back to your goal.  Don’t simply settle on the metrics that are the easiest to track, you want to make sure that you are focused only on tracking what makes sense for your blogging strategy.

Additionally, you will want to drill down and analyze your content to see which posts/topics are generating attention with your readers.  It’s a good idea every month or at least every quarter to look at your most popular posts for the last 30/60/90 days.  What you’re trying to figure out is which posts were more popular with readers and why were they more popular?  For example, if you look at your blogs stats for the last 90 days, you might find that 3 of your 5 most popular posts were posts that included industry news and links to stories within your industry.  That’s a key insight, and it could prompt you to start writing a post recapping industry news every Friday on your blog.  That one change could result in a 15-25% increase in blog traffic over the rest of the year.

Also, look at the keywords that people are using to find your content.  This will also help you learn how to change your content to make it more accessible to search engines.  When you look at your keywords, you will probably find that a lot of the phrases used are something like this: ‘How do I….’ or ‘What’s the best way to….’  So if you start writing your post headlines as a question, that can really help your search results because your post’s headline will closely resemble the actual search phrases that people are using.  One of my most popular posts here is How To Write Your First Blog Post.  A big reason that post is so popular is because the headline closely resembles common search terms such as ‘how do I write my first blog post?’ or ‘how to write my first blog post’.  So factor in how people will search for content when you write your posts and especially your post headline.

Finally, Remember This is All a Guide, Not An Absolute

I want to close with a word of caution: None of this is absolute and it shouldn’t be taken as such.  The purpose of this post is to get you started.  But as you start fleshing out your blog in the coming year, you may find that some of the advice I’ve shared with you here doesn’t seem to be working on your blog.  That could be because you are doing something wrong, or it could be because your blog is different.  For example, it may be that your particular audience wants new content on Saturdays and Sundays, instead of during the middle of the week.  If you truly want to build an awesome blog then you need to experiment and be willing to try new things.  You need to tinker, and see what works and what does not.  I have been blogging now for over 9 years, and I am constantly trying new things.  The reason why I do this is because I want to get better.  Like you, I will read what others tell me I should be doing.  I look for best practices, but I also understand that just because something works for every other blogger doesn’t guarantee that it will work for me.

This post will get you started on your journey to have an amazing blog.  But if you hit a pothole along the way, don’t be afraid to step back, and try something different.  It might not work, but even if it doesn’t, you will still learn something in the process.   As long as you are constantly learning, you are constantly improving.

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Which Needle Are You Moving? How to Tell If Your Business Blog Is Working

BlogMouseOver the past few weeks I have, as you’ve probably noticed, seriously ramped up my blogging.  I’ve gone from writing 1-2 posts here a week to 5-6.  The reason why is because I want to see if I can turn my blog into a serious driver of work leads and referrals.  I started blogging more on October 20th, and I wanted to walk you through some of the metrics I am tracking to tell if my efforts are working.

First, a caveat:  We are talking very small numbers and very inconclusive data at this point.  After another 2 months or so, I should have some decent numbers and trends I can look at and tell if my efforts are paying off.  The goal here isn’t to pass judgement on my efforts after less than a month.  What I want to do is walk you through my thought process in measuring and tracking my efforts so you can apply this same formula to your own business blog to help decide if your efforts are working.

Traffic.  When it comes to blogging, traffic is likely the first metric that you’ll look at.  But traffic is often a ‘feel good’ metric that doesn’t always translate into actual business value.  For example, typical daily traffic here from Monday-Friday prior to October 20th was 700-800 visitors a day.  Now it’s 1,100-1,200 visitors a day.  That’s about a 50% increase in less than a month and sounds nice.  But my main goal from blogging more isn’t to get more traffic, it’s to get more qualified leads.

Now there are some ancillary benefits to increasing traffic.  For example, increasing traffic drives up readership and that makes sponsorships here or as part of a #Blogchat sponsorship more appealing to potential sponsors.

So What Metrics Should You Track to Tell If Your Business Blog is Working? 

First, you need to consider what action you want visitors to your blog to take.  For example, if you ultimately want to sell a particular product on your blog, then the metrics to track could be:

1 – Actual sales from blog visitors

2 – Visits to the product page on the blog

3 – Signups for a free trial of the product

Again, traffic to the blog doesn’t really matter unless that traffic is engaging in the actions that you want.

For me, I want visitors to engage in one of three different actions (ranked in terms of priority):

1 – Contact me about working with me.

2 – Visit pages related to working with me, such as my Work With Me page, or Speaking page, or Bio

3 – Share my content online

The idea is that if they aren’t contacting me directly about possibly working with me, I want them to either check out my info here, or at least share my content with other people so that they might be interested in working with me.

But it’s important to note that the type of engagement that’s likely to be the easiest to get (sharing my content) is the least valuable of the three.  This is common with blogging.  For example I can tell anyone how to get more traffic to their blog; Write more posts.  But just because you can easily get more traffic doesn’t mean that traffic by itself has any real value for you.  Sure, it can make your ego feel good to see that needle moving, but is that meaningful?

So when you are tracking your blog’s efforts, follow this process:

1 – Figure out what you want visitors to do on your blog.  What’s the one most important thing that a visitor could do on your blog?  Order a product?  Sign up for your newsletter?  Share your content?

2 – Track metrics that lead back to that most important goal.  If possible, you want a straight line from the metric you are measuring to the goal.  Prioritize your metrics so that you are tracking the one that most directly leads to your goal for your blog first.

3 – Only track metrics that feed back to your goal for the blog, either directly or indirectly.  If a metric doesn’t impact your ability to reach your goal then don’t track it.

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Why It’s So Important to Have a Strategy Guiding Your Social Media Engagement

OpenRoadI have a love-hate relationship with planning and strategy when it comes to social media.  I hate the planning aspect, but I also understand it is necessary to see the best results.  And I love it when I see those results!

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you know that as often as I can, I like to show you examples of how I am putting the lessons that I am trying to share with you, into action.  Yesterday’s post on social media engagement was a great example of this.

In the post, I talked about the importance of planning out the type of engagement you want from your social media efforts.  Too often, we fail to plan our engagement efforts, then are disappointed with our results.  Yesterday’s post was created to drive two specific types of engagement:

1 – New signups of my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter

2 – Social sharing to help the post rank higher in search engine results for the term “social media engagement”.

Additionally, the content itself was carefully created and crafted to help facilitate those types of engagement.  For example, a very clear Call to Action was placed at the end asking readers to please sign up for my newsletter, and to share the post.

So 24 hours later, what have the results been?  Let’s look at three areas:

1 – Newsletter signups.  This was honestly the top goal for yesterday’s post.  Previously, I had been averaging 3-4 new signups each day for my newsletter.  Over the last 24 hours I have received 21 new signups.  A pretty good jump.

2 – Social sharing.  I wanted to see a lot of sharing of the post, especially on Twitter and Facebook.  As you can see from the numbers at the end of each post, yesterday’s post was the most shared in weeks, with currently 82 retweets on Twitter and 70 Likes on Facebook.  Additionally, yesterday was the 5th best day for traffic so far in 2013.

3 – Search engine results.  I wanted yesterday’s post to rank as high as possible for the exact term “social media engagement”.  When the post was first indexed by Google yesterday at around 10:00 am, it was on the 26th page of the results for the term “social media engagement”.  By 5:00 pm it had moved up to page 10, and at 8:00 pm it was on page 9.  At 6:30 am this morning it was all the way up to page 3, and a few minutes ago at 9:30 am it was on page 2 for “social media engagement”.  Pretty darned good, and if I keep writing more posts with that term (as I did in this post) it will probably help push that post up further.

Pretty good results, right?  My point in writing this post is to impress upon you the importance of planning out your social media efforts.  Look at these results and think how quickly your blog could grow if you wrote just one post a week that was this successful?  I am definitely thinking more along these lines!

So before you write that next post for your business blog, ask yourself these questions:

1 – What am I trying to accomplish with this post?

2 – What type of engagement am I trying to get?

3 – How can this post drive that type of engagement?

Start doing this before you write every post, and see if you don’t start seeing much better results from your blog.  Oh and if you still aren’t seeing the type of engagement you want from your social media efforts, email me and I’ll be happy to discuss how I can help you!

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The One Simple Change That Dropped My Blog’s Traffic By 25%

Two weeks ago I wrote a pretty popular blog post on whether or not bloggers should include dates on their posts.  There was plenty of support both for having and removing dates from posts.

Now at that time, I did not include dates on my posts.  But since one of my mantras is that bloggers should test things for themselves with their blogs, I decided to add back the dates to posts for the rest of the month, and then report back my results.

Today it’s been 2 weeks since I added back dates to my posts, and I just took them back off.  I think this picture of my statistics over the last 30 days explains why (the blue X is the day that I added dates back to the posts):

Yep.  As soon as I added dates back to the posts, the overall traffic here started falling.  Quite sharply, as you can see.

Now as part of this, I said I’d look at how search traffic and referral traffic from Twitter was impacted.  Let’s first look at search:

The blue X is on the 14th.  The next day, the 15th, was actually the best day ever for search traffic.  But as you can see, it starts falling pretty sharply after that.  Overall, search traffic fell about 25% over the last 2 weeks.  And given that search traffic drives about 57% of the traffic to this blog, that’s a big hit.

Traffic from Twitter was down a bit as well, but not quite as much:

 Twitter traffic was down about 25% the first week after I added back dates, then another 15% the second week.

Does all this prove that your search and Twitter traffic will fall sharply if you put dates on your posts?  Nope, it does suggest that you should test both with and without dates before you decide.  That’s why I am always harping on testing this stuff, from now on if anyone asks me if it’s better to have dates on their posts or not, I can answer with ‘All I can tell you is that my search and Twitter traffic fell by about 25% when I added dates to my posts.  But you should test it on your blog.’

So why don’t you test this on your blog?  Pick the first two weeks of February, and take dates off your posts if you have them on now, and add them back if you have taken them off.  Track the changes.  I am going to keep doing that, if my search and Twitter traffic now returns to where it was before the 14th, I will be almost positive that adding dates was the culprit.

Never assume when you can test.

UPDATE: There’s been a few people here and elsewhere criticizing the methodology used here, whether or not the test period was long enough, etc.  I don’t want y’all to get hung up on the validity (yay or nay) of the test itself, but instead focus on the fact that I did test.  I don’t want your takeaway from reading this post to be that you should remove dates from your blog if you want to see traffic go up.  The takeaway should be that you should test this on your blog, and not accept my advice or any other blogger’s.  We learn by doing for ourselves, not by blindly following other bloggers.  Either way, test it on your blog then you will know for sure.

SECOND UPDATE(2-5-2013):  Here’s a screenshot I took of this blog’s traffic for the last 30 days, as of yesterday.  The blue X was on the 14th, and that was the day I added dates back to the posts here.  You can then see what happened to traffic levels for the next 2 weeks.  The red X was on Jan 28th, and that was the day on which I took the dates back off.  I think the immediate rise in traffic tells the tale.  But again, don’t assume, test for yourself on your own blog.

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My Posts Have An Average Lifespan of 2-3 Days on Twitter

I was digging through this blog’s stats this morning in Google Analytics, and I noticed something interesting.  As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, one of my goals for 2013 is to blog more often.  A big reason why is because I want to increase the traffic here, and so far in January traffic is up a bit, and that’s to be expected from a more frequent posting pattern.

So what I want to do as the traffic increases is understand which traffic sources are driving that increase.  One of them is Twitter, which is by far the social site that sends me the most referral traffic.  I started looking at the individual posts in 2013 that have received the most traffic from Twitter, and I noticed something:  They received almost all of their referral traffic from Twitter in the first 2-3 days, then almost nothing.

Here’s the number of Twitter referrals for the most popular post so far this month, ‘Done’ is Better Than ‘Perfect’ When it Comes to Blogging, which was published on Jan 1st:

As you can see, good for 3 days, then traffic volume falls off a cliff.

Here’s the traffic pattern for the 3rd most popular post (#2 was one that I linked to for multiple days as a #blogchat topic and it skewed the results a bit I think), which was The Biggest Mistake Companies Make When Engaging Their Fans Via Social Media published on Jan 8th:

Same pattern, traffic for 3 days, then it dies.  There was a bump back on the 14th, and that was the same day the post was listed as a link on a New York Times article and a few people RTed the post on Twitter, I am assuming after they found it via the NYT link.

Finally, here’s the 4th most popular post, Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts?, on Jan 14th:

Two days, then flatline.

There’s a few takeaways I have from this:

1 – These stats suggest that when we are on Twitter, links have a very short window to get our attention.  I don’t think that’s a huge revelation.

2 – If we want to leverage Twitter as a platform to draw attention to our writings, then it pays to focus on fewer topics versus more.  If we are only paying attention in short bursts on Twitter, then it helps if you are consistently giving us the same or similar topics to look at.

3 – Since our attention spans are so short, it means we can cover the same topics repeatedly.  This is where I think you can really leverage Twitter as a channel to drive big referral traffic back to your blog.  By blogging frequently, and by frequently blogging about the same or similar topics.  Notice from the above graphs that the 3 posts were published on the 1st, the 8th and the 14th.  Pretty spread out, but what if those same posts were published three days in a row?  The spike in traffic from each would overlap and by the 2nd and 3rd days, referral traffic as a whole from Twitter would be pretty high.

4 – If you plan on having Twitter be a driver of traffic to your blog, you probably need to publish a new post at least every 2-3 days.  If we assume that the average blog post has a lifespan of 2-3 days on Twitter, publishing a new blog post every month isn’t going to do much for your referral traffic from the site.

So that’s something to think about.  I think for me what I would like to see happen is to find a way to not only extend that average lifespan to say 3-4 days, but to also chain together posts that bring in higher amounts of referral traffic from Twitter on a more regular basis.

I would also be interested in hearing what the rest of you are seeing with the referral traffic from Twitter to your posts.  Are you seeing most of your traffic coming in the first 2-3 days as well?  Do you see a longer range?  Shorter?

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A Case Study in How Your Blog’s Traffic Stats Can Fool You

I’ve been blogging since 2005, and in those last 7 years, I’ve learned that every year my blog’s traffic begins to fall off around the 12th or 13th of December.  Every year without fail.

But it turns out that last week was the 3rd best traffic week ever here.  What’s really interesting is that the first two weeks were driven by a spike one day due to a particular post, and then the traffic died down the rest of the week.  But as you can see, traffic here last week was high every day:

So I was excited about that, but as I said, I know that in the past traffic for the blog typically starts falling by now.  So I decided to do some digging into traffic sources to see what was going on.  Here was my first clue that something was amiss:

That’s my search traffic here over the last 7 days.  As you can see, the high point was Monday the 10th, and then it starts dropping.  That is the pattern I expected to see with the blog’s overall traffic as well.  So if Search traffic is acting normally for this time of year, and overall traffic is still up, that must mean that there’s another source of traffic that’s making up the difference.

So next, let’s look at the top traffic sources here over the last 7 days:

Another ‘A-Ha!’ moment.  The #2 source of traffic to this blog over the last 7 days was Paper.Li.  That’s a referral source that I haven’t had in past years, so that helps explain why overall traffic isn’t falling yet like it typically does this time in December.  It seems that the boost from Paper.Li is making up for the fall in search traffic, which is typically 50-60% of my traffic here.

So at this point it’s safe to assume that the traffic I am getting from Paper.Li is coming from The #Blogchat Weekly that I set up, right?  Well, not exactly.  In fact, let’s look at the traffic that Paper.Li has sent here over the last 7 days:

What the hell?!?  From Monday to Thursday, Paper.Li sent about 20 visitors a day here, but from Friday to Sunday, it sent over 250 visitors a day!  That explains why traffic was up Friday-Sunday, when typically traffic on those 3 days is the lowest of the week.

But why the surge starting on Friday?  Because on those days, Paper.Li added a small band at the top of every Paper.Li page that encouraged users to join #Blogchat, gave them the topic, and a link back here.  Additionally, this is a wonderfully smart move on the part of Paper.Li as this month’s #Blogchat sponsor because they understand that the more they can do to help me, the more I will do to help them.  BTW, did you know they are currently offering a month of free Pro service with no credit card required? 😉

So as you can see, never assume when it comes to your blog’s stats.  If I had simply looked at overall traffic, I would have assumed that traffic for this week will be high as well.  But since I did some digging and saw search was starting to fall, I can assume that will continue and as a result, overall traffic this week will be down.  The point is, it pays to understand how your site’s traffic is influenced by multiple sources, because once you understand that, you have a better understanding of the overall health of your blog.

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Engagement Without Action Is Just Noise

Comments.

Likes.

Followers.

Pins.

These are all ‘engagement’ metrics that many companies track to decide if their social media marketing efforts are successful.  It’s completely understandable, because these metrics are very easy to find.

And that’s typically the problem.  Too often we place too much value on the social media metrics that are the easiest to track.  You shouldn’t be tracking metrics such as comments and likes because they are easy to find, you should be tracking them because you understand that they lead to a desired outcome for your company.

What happens after that comment or Like?  When someone follows you on Twitter, what change in their behavior does that lead to?

If you can’t answer these questions then why are you tracking these metrics?  And to be clear, all of these metrics have value, I’m not knocking engagement or measuring metrics that attempt to measure them for social media tools.  My point is that you need more than simply Likes and Comments.  You need to build engagement with people that leads to some desired outcome for you company.  You need to be able to show that people that comment on your blog are more likely to do X which increases their chance of doing Y, which has a positive impact on your business’ bottom line.  If you can make that connection from point to point, then you have proven the value of blog comments for your company, and you should be doing everything you can to encourage them, and you should be tracking them.

But if you aren’t at that point, then you need to invest some time and energy in figuring out exactly why you are measuring metrics that you can’t prove have a positive impact on your business.  And the odds are that you can prove these metrics impact your brand, you just need to do the work to find the connection.

Create Content —–>  Get engagement —-> _______?

When you can fill in that blank and show how it helps you reach your end business goal for using social media, then you’re set.  A lot of people say it’s easy to use social media, but the only people telling you its easy to see the results you want are the ones trying to sell you something 😉

Businessman holding megaphone making noise image from Big Stock.

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Never underestimate the impact search traffic has on your blog

So this blog has been effectively dormant since early May when I started working on my book.  I’ve left a few posts here and there, but my volume has definitely fallen off a cliff.

Which would lead you to believe that my blog’s traffic should have been down this summer as well, right?  Surprisingly, it was not:

This graph is the weekly traffic here for 2012.  The blue X marks the week at the end of April/beginning of May where I announced I was working on Think Like a Rock Star.  There was a sharp decrease the following week in traffic, but after that traffic has been more or less flat for the rest of the summer.

Which doesn’t make sense, because obviously if I have been posting less, then referral traffic from social sites like Twitter and Facebook should be down as well, right?

Here’s referral traffic from Twitter this year:

And here’s referral traffic from Facebook for this year:

Both Twitter and Facebook referrals spiked a bit in July because of this post, but other than that both sources have been slowly decreasing in the amount of traffic they send here.

So if overall traffic here has been flat this summer, and referrals from social media sites are down, that has to mean that another source of traffic has increased, right?

Yes, here’s how search traffic has done here this year:

As you can see, search traffic has had slow and steady growth throughout the year, and that continued throughout the summer even though the number of new blog posts I published here decreased dramatically.  In fact, the increase in volume of search traffic was enough to effectively negate the loss I saw in referral traffic from Twitter and Facebook.

But here’s the thing about search traffic:  It can take a long time to cultivate a blog that can give you a solid volume of search traffic.  Here’s the monthly volume of search traffic over the lifetime of this blog:

The total volume of search traffic here for my first full month of posting in June of 2009 was 85 visits.

Last month I had 8,261 visitors arrive here from search.  That’s over 8,000 new monthly visitors in 3 years from ONE traffic source!

But the kicker is, notice that it took me approximately a year of blogging here before I started to see any real gains in search traffic volume:

June 2009 – 85 visits

June 2010 – 694 visits

June 2011 – 3,681 visits

June 2012 – 6,553 visits

The real search traffic benefits started kicking in after I had been blogging 12-18 months.

So if you are trying to figure out if your blogging efforts are paying off, don’t just look at raw traffic numbers, drill down and see how each traffic source is moving.  For example, I now know that my search traffic is going to continue to rise even if I post less.  But now that I will be posting more in the Fall, that means referral traffic from social sites like Twitter and Facebook will increase as well, which means overall blog traffic will grow as a result.

If you’ve been blogging for over a year, what have you seen from your search traffic?  Has it increased?  And if so, how long did you have to blog before you started to see that increase?

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Subscribe to My Social Media Marketing Newsletter!

Social Media Marketing Newsletter

Starting next Wednesday, I’ll be running a weekly newsletter in addition to (almost) daily posts here.  The content focus will be slightly different, however.

Here, I cover Social Media primarily, but a blend of content that can benefit the individual, as well as those that are using Social Media for their company.  But this newsletter will be aimed solely at marketers and anyone using Social Media within their company or organization.  Each week the newsletter will feature original content that’s designed to do 3 things:

1 – Help you solve an existing Social Media Marketing issue you are having.  One week we might talk about building a better blogger outreach program, the next look at getting a better handle on our blog’s analytics to increase leads.  A case study here and there will be examined.

2 – Give you tips and advice for improving your day-to-day tasks and routines as well as managing your workflow.

3 – Keep you up-to-date on where I will be speaking/appearing, and giving you information on how we can work together.

I cannot stress this enough, the content in this newsletter will be original content.  Some of it may eventually make its way here to the blog, but it won’t be that often.

So if you’re working for a company or organization that wants to learn more about how to better use Social Media to connect with your customers and/or activate your brand advocates, please do subscribe to my newletter by filling out the quick form below.  You’ll input your email address then be sent an email to confirm your subscription.

Thank you so much, see you next Wednesday!


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Two Critical Components of Successful Social Media Marketing That We Often Overlook

Successful Social Media MarketingBuilding and Sustaining Momentum.

Monday was the biggest traffic day for this blog in over a month with almost 1,000 visitors.  I really wanted to write a killer post yesterday that would build off the momentum created on Monday, and maybe even result in a bigger day on Tuesday.

But I couldn’t do it.  I hit a bit of a writer’s block, and instead wrote a bit of a ranty post based around the rumors that CNN might by Mashable.  While that’s a topic that was interesting to me, I knew it wasn’t going to be an incredibly successful post, and it wasn’t.

Yet the interesting part is this: Traffic on Tuesday was up about 33% over the previous Tuesday.  Why?  Because of the momentum I had built here on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Here’s the Top 10 posts here yesterday, ranked by pageviews:

Building blog traffic, social media marketing

Note that Monday’s post accounted for 21.6% of the pageviews here on Tuesday.  Also note that the TWO posts I wrote here yesterday didn’t have a third of the pageviews of Monday’s post.

Thankfully, Monday’s post on optimizing your blog posts for search engines AND social media sites was still popular yesterday, so much so that it was the most popular post here for the 2nd day in a row.  And it might make it 3 days in a row today.  But the point is that the momentum created by the popularity of Monday’s post was able to carry this blog yesterday, when neither of the posts I published were very popular, based on pageviews.

There is something to be said for building and sustaining momentum with your social media efforts.  I think this is probably more evident on our blogs than anywhere else.  Most of us know what it’s like to go a few days, or maybe even a few weeks without posting regularly.  Life gets in the way, business gets in the way.  We lose interest and inspiration.

Then we get to a point where we are ready to ‘get back in the saddle’.  The problem is, we’ve lost our momentum.  3 months ago when we were blogging 3 times a week like clockwork, we were getting comments on every post and traffic was steady or increasing every day.

Now, our audience has left us.  We’ve lost the momentum our blog had, and it really is like starting all over.  But that’s ok, because we’ll get it back.  For the next two weeks we’ll again post 3 new posts a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Heading into that 3rd week, our traffic will be up sharply, and our commenters will be back.  We’re starting to get several emails a day about our products again, whereas for the past few weeks they had fallen to 1 or 2 a week.  Hmmmm….

My problem in the past has always been that I build momentum here, and then I reach a point where I tell myself ‘Ok, now the blog is humming along, I need to turn my attention to something else…’  And that’s when the wheels fall off.  Race your winners, and rest your losers.

Are you building momentum with your social media efforts? And if you are, how are you going to sustain that momentum?