MackCollier.com

by

You Learn How to Be a Better Blogger By Doing, Not By Listening

I have a love/hate relationship with list posts.  On the one hand, those ’10 Steps to Launching a Business Blog’ or ‘5 Ways to Improve Your Blogging Today’ posts are always popular.  I know, cause I’ve written plenty of them.   And even though a lot of bloggers don’t like them, they do help bloggers get started tackling their problems.

And that’s where the hate part of my relationship kicks in.  I hate that too many bloggers follow ‘list’ posts to the letter, and that’s it.  Those list posts work great if you view them as a starting point and an example of how you could improve.  They aren’t the end-all-be-all of the blogging experience.

The only way to truly improve as a blogger is by blogging.  At some point you have to stop looking for everyone else to give you the answers, and you have to go out and break stuff.  I can tell you what has worked for me, and I have good insights into what will likely work for you.  But I can’t guarantee anything, and neither can you.

For example, about a week ago I posted here about whether or not blog posts should have dates on them.  There was plenty of support for both sides of the issue.  I made the point at the time that the only way each of us would know for sure how adding or removing dates from our posts affected our blog was to do it.  So I added dates back to the posts here, and started tracking changes in my search and referral traffic from Twitter.  I told everyone I’d do that through the rest of the month.  So far, traffic from both sources is down, and if this continues I will take dates back off at the end of the month.

But the key thing is, now I know.  I didn’t just read what other bloggers were writing on the topic and accept their experiences as my own.  I am testing it on my blog.

This is a big reason why we were so passionate about structuring BlogHOT as a learning environment.  We didn’t want to just create a conference where attendees were lectured at all day then went home.  We wanted them to be doing stuff and interacting with each other and learning how to do this blogging stuff for themselves.

Because when it comes to blogging, you learn by doing, not by listening.

by

Hobbies, Deeper Learning and the One Thing You May Not Know About Scott Monty

If I asked you about Scott Monty, you’d probably offer up that he’s the Global Head of Social Media for Ford.  Everyone knows that. But did you also know that Scott is a huge Sherlock Holmes fan and has one of the best hobby blogs I’ve ever seen, The Baker Street Blog?

Last night during #Blogchat while we were discussing creating more advanced content on our blogs, a few of you correctly pointed out that people that run hobby blogs are extremely passionate about their hobbies.  They have the desire to find that more advanced content, because they have a passion to learn more about their hobby.

For example, I am a huge fan of the classic tv sitcom MASH.  I have a friend that is as well, but he takes it to another level.  What he does is collect autographs from the cast members.  And not just the main characters like Hawkeye and Frank Burns, he especially goes after the actors that only appeared in one or two episodes.  The more obscure the better.  He spends hours hunting down names and addresses, and knows all the autograph sites and MASH sites to find this information (started by people that are just as passionate as he is).

Our passion drives us to learn more about the topics we are passionate about.

Not only does it drive us to learn more about the topics we are passionate about, it drives is to connect with others that know more than we do.  We are constantly driven to learn more about the topics we are passionate about, and we want to connect with others that share our passion and we want to discuss that passion with others.  Because as Kathy Sierra puts it ‘people with a passion for something will not STFU!’

So how do you focus on the topics that your audience is passionate about?  Let’s say you blog about….blogging.  Most people I know are not passionate about blogging as a tool, they are passionate about what the tool allows them to do.  For example, maybe they are blogging to improve their chances of getting a job.  Maybe they are blogging to share their passion for their favorite brand.  Maybe they are blogging to connect with other people that are dealing with an extremely rare disease.  Whatever their area of passion is, it typically is not about the blog as a tool, but what the blog allows them to do.

One final thought on passion: Learning feeds passion.  As we learn more about a topic, we feel we are getting better at that topic.  Maybe we start studying the Civil War.  First we learn the causes of the war.  Then we move on and learn about the major battles, the major generals.  Before you know it we are dissecting whether or not Robert E Lee’s battleplan at Gettysburg didn’t work because it was a terrible plan, or because it was a great plan that was poorly executed due to the incompetence of his generals.

So as a blogger, if you can help you audience learn more about a topic they love, they will not only become more passionate about it, they will become more passionate about you.

PS: Just as I was finishing this post, Kelly left this comment on yesterday’s post – “I believe inspiration is a large part of the education process, regardless if it is beginning or advanced level.  I look to be inspired and even when I’m just starting out on my new journey I look to mentors who can help solve my problems or answer questions now, as well as inspire me in the future. I want to grow with them.”

Double PS: Here’s an oldie but a goodie from Kathy on creating more engaging content for your audience.

by

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?

by

Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts?

There are many common topics discussed during #blogchat, and one of the most popular is whether or not bloggers should include dates in their posts.

Now as you can see, I do not include dates on my posts(although the date does show up in search results).  I honestly cannot remember WHY I removed them, but I do know that I wouldn’t have done so unless there was some logic behind the move that made sense to me.  My hunch is that a certain SEO-savvy friend explained that it would help my search results, but I really don’t remember.

The topic came up again last night, and again there wasn’t a consensus answer.  Some people again said they hate when bloggers don’t include dates because they want to know how ‘old’ the content is.  A few were like me that they believed there was an SEO benefit, but no one could explain what that benefit was.

So I decided enough was enough, and took to Google to see if I could find a definitive answer on whether or not bloggers should include dates on their posts.

Sadly, I could not.  But I did find some interesting fodder both for and against having dates on posts.

The case for having dates on posts

First, I found several bloggers that lamented that they felt removing posts was akin to hiding something.  Commenters routinely agreed, and ironically, I found a post from Shel Holtz that lamented the fact that he shared a link on Twitter only to later discover that the post he shared was actually 5 years old.  I thought this was ironic because….

The case for removing dates from posts

…Shel’s post linked to a post that Jim Connolly did (which I found before reading Shel’s post) where Jim actually experimented with removing dates from his posts to see what, if anything, would happen.

Jim found that his comments and number of shares via social media sites significantly increased when he removed the dates from his posts.  Further, Jim added what I think is a very salient thought concerning dates on posts:

It appears that the date then acts as a filter, with each person having a different threshold.  So, some people may not bother reading a post that’s more than a week old, others may have a 6 month threshold, whilst others will be fine with posts that are years old.  If the date is not there, it seems more people start reading the posts and then make their mind up, based on the value of the content rather than the date it was published.

This is what has always worried me because to many people reading and sharing blog posts, newer is better.

Here’s an example, which blog post would you rather read:

1 – Ten Steps to Launching a Social Media Strategy For a Global Brand, dated March 27th, 2010

2 – Ten Steps to Launching a Social Media Strategy For a Global Brand, dated January 14th, 2013

Easy choice, right?  Newer is the clear winner.

Unless…what if that post from 2010 was written by Scott Monty, head of Social Media at Ford, and the post from today was written by an anonymous marketing intern at an anonymous marketing agency, that simply googled ‘launching a social media strategy for global brand’ and mish-mashed several older posts together (including Scott’s).

Two sides to the date/no date coin 

On the one hand, many people want to know how old a post is when they read it, to find out if the information is dated.  On the other hand, and this goes back to Jim’s findings, many people that see an older date on a post will automatically assume the information is dated, even if it isn’t.

At the end of the day, you as a blogger should ultimately do what you feel is best for your blog, and its readers, when it comes to adding or deleting the date from your blog post.  What works for me may not work for you, and vice-versa.

But I will offer this piece of advice:  If you are on the fence about either adding or deleting dates from your posts, then you should do exactly what Jim did, you should TEST to see what changes.  If you are using dates, remove them for the next 2 weeks and see what, if anything, changes.  If you aren’t using them, put them back and see what changes.

The problem that many bloggers have is that we don’t test things enough on our own.  We want someone else to always tell us what does and does not work.  Sometimes, we need to move the puzzle pieces for ourselves and see what happens.

What do you think?  Do you prefer to read blog posts with dates, or without?  Which would make you less likely to share a post, a post with no date, or a post with a date from 2009?

 

UPDATE: Based on the excellent comments from y’all as well as the desire to practice what I preach, I’ve decided to add dates back to the posts here for the rest of the month.  At that point I will report any perceived changes up or down in both search traffic and referral traffic from social sites.

by

The Case For Adding ‘Easter Eggs’ to Your Blog Posts

Yesterday C.C. Chapman wrote a fabulous post on why we need ‘next level’ conferences.  Please check it out, and there are a TON of amazing comments, I am still going through them all.  I did want to take a slightly different take on this issue because as I’ve seen in the past, when someone raises a ‘someone needs to do this’ post like this, typically most people read that as ‘someone else‘.  Not knocking C.C.’s post at all, it’s a great discussion starter, but human nature being what it is, most people will wait for someone else to make that move.

So instead of making it about ‘someone else’, I started thinking about how individuals as content creators and speakers can take our content to the ‘next level’.  I think the best speakers and content creators like C.C. are already doing this.  Most of the audiences we write and speak for are interested in more 101-level content.  But not everyone, some people are wanting more, and some of those people started out at the 101-level, but thanks to our content, they are now at a more advanced stage.

Which brings me to the topic of adding ‘easter eggs’ to our blog posts.  If you are a gamer, you are familiar with the concept of an easter egg.  It’s a small addition to a game that really isn’t required to complete the game, and will typically go un-noticed by the ‘casual’ gamer.  It’s typically hidden, so it’s a type of reward for the gamers that are willing to do more exploring and to look everywhere.

Here’s an example.  In the game Batman: Arkham City, if you go to a certain place in the game at a certain time and do a certain thing, you are rewarded with a cameo appearance from Killer Croc:

Now I am going to corrupt the gamer’s definition of an ‘easter egg’ here a bit when I talk about adding them to your blog posts.  To a gamer, an easter egg is a reward in the sense that it’s cool and fun, but it doesn’t typically make them a better gamer or better at the game they are playing.  What I’m suggesting is what if you add ‘easter eggs’ to your blog posts that did make your more advanced readers better?

For example, my audience here is like most social media blogs, typically made up of people looking for 101-level social media help.  So while I want to cater to that audience, an example of adding an easter egg might be to add a tip to the post that the 101-level reader isn’t ready for, but that the 201-level reader is looking for.  How many times have you read a blog post and seen the author add a ‘Pro Tip’?  This is the same basic idea, add more advanced content or tips to ‘reward’ the more advanced readers.

To be honest, this is something I probably don’t do a very good job with.  I tend to forget about what happens to the readers that are ready for more advanced content because of my posts.  Recently on #Blogchat we talked about the idea of creating Topic Buckets to help blog more often and to give structure to the content you create.

Maybe to add another layer to that, we should consider adding 201 level content as well?

For example, the idea with Topic Buckets was that if you could come up with say 4 main subjects you wanted to cover on your blog, then if you could write one post a week for each bucket, then you’ve written 4 posts a week!  But what if you also added a learning context to those buckets, and said that 3 of your weekly posts would be 101-level, and one would be 201 level?

I will have to noodle on this for a while, in the meanwhile, what do you think about this idea of adding ‘easter eggs’ to blog posts, or even writing more advanced posts on occasion?

by

#Blogchat Topic for Sunday: How You Can Use Topic Buckets to Blog More Often

One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog is share with you what’s worked for me.  Earlier this week I wrote a post called ‘Done is better than Perfect when it comes to blogging‘.  This post got a lot of interesting feedback, but the point I wanted to make was that when you blog more often, you become a better blogger.  That’s worked for me, as well as other bloggers I know.

Now, another reason I wrote that post was because it’s something I intend to do this year: Blog more often.  Here’s why:

As with a lot of you, my blog is technically a marketing tool for my consulting and speaking.  So really, this blog at its core is a glorified business development tool.  In theory, the more I blog and create valuable content for my readers, the more my awareness grows, and the more often I will get work from this blog.

Now for the past three years, my blogging here has followed more or less the same pattern:

1 – From January through March, I typically blog more than any other time of the year.  A big reason why is because for whatever reason, work is typically slow around the first of the year.  So I have more time to blog, plus I need to blog more to get more work leads coming in.  In 2011 and 2012, March was my biggest traffic month of the year.

2 – Around April or so, more work leads start coming in.  Which is good, because it means I am busier.

3 – By July and August, I am typically swamped.  I usually have to turn down work.  Now on the surface this seems like a great place to be, but the mistake I have made every year since 2010 is…when I get super busy in the second half of the year, I stop blogging.

4 – By November and December, work has slowed back down.  A big reason why work has slowed down is because…I’m not blogging as often!  When work picked up a few months earlier, I decided to focus on the work, and let my blog get put on the backburner.

5 – So around January or so I start blogging like a madman all over again, and by March or April the biz leads start coming back.

 

I mention all this because I’ve begun to realize that my blogging inactivity every Fall was keeping this blog from really going to the next level.  I realized this in 2011, and planned on blogging consistently throughout 2012.  But then I got the book deal for Think Like a Rock Star, and convinced myself I needed to focus on writing an amazing book versus writing an amazing blog.  So this year I decided to re-dedicate myself to blogging more often.

Then a few days ago I saw this video from Michael Hyatt explaining how he grew his blog to over 300K visitors a month:

Notice in the last couple of minutes how Michael talks about the growth of his blog. He started blogging in 2004 with only 110 visitors a month. After 2007, he was still only at 700 visitors a month, but the next year his readership spiked to 20,000 visitors a month.  One of the reasons that he credited for the huge jump in the fifth year was that he made a commitment that year to blog every weekday, or 5 times a week.  He says that was a big reason why his blog took off.  Heading into 2012 I realized that my blog was too important NOT to blog much more often than I had been.

And from participating in #Blogchat I know that many of you are having the same problems.  You want to blog more often, but coming up with ideas is sometimes tough.  Something that has helped me is organizing your blog’s focus into Topic Buckets.

The basic idea is this:  Pick 2-5 main topic areas that you want to cover on your blog.  For example for me, I currently have 4 Topic Buckets:

1 – Blogging tips and advice

2 – Case studies on how rock stars and companies can better connect with their fans

3 – Case studies on how companies are and can use social media better

4 – Promotional, either talking about speaking I am doing, work, etc.

Now the great thing about Topic Buckets is that they really help you organize your posting patterns.  You may be trying to think about how you can blog 2-3 times a week, but if you can create 2-3 Topic Buckets, then all you have to do is write one post a week for each topic, and you are set!  Also, it’s a good way to keep track of what you’re blogging about.  For example, if I look back on my posts over the last 2 weeks, I might see that I haven’t really written a post that comes from one of my buckets, so I know I need to try to address that one soon.

Now even with this approach I’ll still sometimes run out of post ideas.  A great tip I have for helping find topic is via Google News searches.  I search for terms like ‘music marketing’ and ‘brand evangelists’ and ‘social media case study’.  It’s a great way to keep up to take on news involving these topics, and typically these searches are coming from sources that are different from the same blogs and sites that are being bounced around on Twitter and Facebook.

So if you are like me and wanting to blog more often, check out #Blogchat on Twitter tomorrow night at 8pm Central.  Hope to see everyone there and hope 2013 is a great blogging year for all of us!

by

‘Done’ is better than ‘Perfect’ when it comes to blogging

I’m enjoying reading Ekaterina Walter’s new book Think Like Zuck, which is about the five keys to business success that you can learn from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  In the book, Ekaterina talks about one of the sayings often heard at Facebook is ‘Done’ is better than ‘Perfect’.  Reading this reminded me of a recent blog post I read by a person in this space lamenting the fact that there were too many ‘bad’ blogs out there.  Too many people creating worthless crap, and this person announced that they weren’t going to contribute to the problem.  They proclaimed that they were only going to write when they had something worthwhile to share.  And if that meant that they didn’t blog for weeks or months, that it didn’t matter because when they did, their blog post would be more valuable to everyone, including themselves.

This person was lying to himself.

Many of us have had this same conversation with our blogging selves.  We tell ourselves that we just can’t blog every week, or for some of us, not even every month.  There’s too much going on, and besides, if we write a new blog post and no one comments or RTs it, well…I just don’t even want to think about it.

Blogging is like anything else, it’s a learning process.  The more you blog, the easier ideas come to you.  The more chances you have to see how people react to a particular topic you cover, or the tone you use.  As a result, your overall writing becomes better and the entire blogging process becomes easier for you.

As a byproduct, your platform expands.  Not only is your blogging improving, but more people are being exposed to your ideas because they are being shared more often.  And as they are being shared more often, you get more engagement on your blog, and more ideas for better blog posts.  Which leads to more (and better) blog posts, which grows your platform even more, and the cycle is created.

At first I wasn’t going to write this post today.  I have one ready to go for tomorrow, and besides, I wanted to wait before publishing this post.  I wanted to make it ‘perfect’.  What would have likely happened is I would have kept putting off finishing this post, and after a week or two, I would have deleted this draft.

But in 2013 I am going to publish more imperfect blog posts rather than saving more ‘perfect’ drafts.

 

by

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.

by

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.

by

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?