MackCollier.com

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It’s 2012 and the Idea that ‘Content is King’ is Still Total Bull****

Content marketing, blogging strategy

Yesterday’s post on how Seth approaches blogging drew a big response from y’all.  I got comments, emails, even phone calls about the post.  Some people agreed with me, others disagreed, but a nice and robust conversation resulted, which is all I could hope for.

Part of the reason why I wanted to write that post was to address a long-held belief in the blogging community that ‘Content is King’, and that if you create good content, blogging fame, numbers and riches will eventually come your way.  Just write good stuff, put it out there, and the blogging world is yours.

In my experience, this thinking is total bullshit.

Granted, creating valuable content is critical to your blogging strategy’s success.  But creating great content alone is NOT enough.  We have too many sources vying for our attention.  If you want to get your blog noticed, you have to first create content that I find value in, but second you have to make sure I notice it.

This is the main reason why I say that community is more important than content when it comes to being a successful blogger.  Simply writing amazing content isn’t enough for 99% of us.  We still need to engage with others in order to not only help that content get noticed, but engaging with others also improves that quality of the content we DO create.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I literally had no idea what I was doing.  So I started blogging, just writing posts every day.  And honestly, I think some of those posts were my best work.

But the problem was, no one was noticing them.  For weeks I wrote every day, and no one visited the blog.  No traffic, no comments, nothing.  I was beginning to think I wasn’t cut out for blogging.

At this same time, I was reading all the ‘top’ blogs.  I wanted to see what the ‘best’ bloggers were doing, in the hope that I could learn from their success, and apply it to my own efforts.  I didn’t really crack the blogging code, but along the way, I found a lot of interesting blogs, and began to comment on them every day.

So I kept blogging along, every day, creating (what I thought were) great blog posts, that got zero response.  Then suddenly after a few weeks, I started getting comments.  First a couple, then after a few days, every new post I would write would get comments!  At the same time, traffic went up, and incoming links started pouring in!  I loved the fact that I was suddenly getting comments and traffic, but had no idea where they were coming from.

Then one day a reader left a comment on a post and mentioned that they were commenting on my blog because they found my comment on their blog.  I went back and checked, and almost all of the comments I was getting, as well as the links, were coming from bloggers and blogs that I had visited first, and commented on.

I learned a very valuable blogging lesson that day: All the great content in the world is meaningless if no one sees it.

By reading and participating on other blogs, I was giving those bloggers and their readers an incentive to come check out my content on my blog.  And in doing so, I was getting comments on my content, as well as links.

And if you still want to say that you believe that Content IS King, that’s fine.  Because while Content may be King, Community is the Queen and SHE runs the castle 😉

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Seth Godin is a Very Smart Marketer and a Very Average Blogger

Seth Godin, blogging, marketing

Last night I saw where Kristy had linked to this post by Seth, where Seth points us to a list of 12 blogging mistakes you can make from SEOMoz.  Seth proudly acknowledges that he breaks at least 7 of these rules, and closes his post with this pearl of wisdom:

I’m not writing to maximize my SEO or conversion or even my readership. I’m writing to do justice to the things I notice, to the ideas in my head and to the people who choose to read my work.

The interesting lesson: One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.

Seth has found a blogging strategy that works wonderfully well for him.  The problem is, it’s total crap for 99% of the rest of us.

Seth is blogging the way he wants to because he can afford to.  He had a huge audience BEFORE he started blogging.  That’s the key.  He already had a large group of people that were actively devouring any content with his name on it.  So when he launched his blog, it was an instant hit, and nearly a decade later it’s still going strong.

So does that mean that Seth’s interesting lesson has any relevance for you as a new blogger?  Sure….assuming that you have 2 million people on your email list, or just sold your company to Yahoo!, or have already written several successful marketing books.  And having a bald head helps, I guess.

Otherwise, you probably need to follow (or at least consider following) the blogging best practices that Seth so openly breaks.  Because you aren’t Seth Godin.

Which takes me back to the reason for this post.  Kristy’s right, millions of people all across the country AND world look up to Seth and treasure his advice on any topic.  And they typically do so with good reason.  But honestly, when Seth starts giving blogging advice, he’s typically outkicked his coverage.

Seth almost never adds pictures to his posts.

Seth writes horrible post titles.

Seth doesn’t allow comments on his posts.

Seth pays little to no attention to SEO.

And Seth can proudly do all these things, because his name is Seth Godin.  If his name was Bob Smith and he launched a marketing blog following his own blogging strategy, it would likely be a complete flop.  It would be a blog full of short posts with some great marketing advice that no one would likely ever find, because Seth wasn’t following any of the rules for building an audience and making his content more discoverable.

Here’s another interesting lesson: It’s a helluva lot easier to move an existing audience to a new place than it is to build one from scratch.

If you are a blogger that’s trying to build an audience for your blog, then there’s certain things you need to do to help your cause:

You need to pay attention to your post titles.

You need to think about what keywords you’ll work into your title and post.

You need to focus on SEO.

You need to include relevant pictures in as many posts as possible.

You need to seriously consider letting readers comment on your blog.

You need to do these things because your name is NOT Seth Godin, and in this case, what works for his blog probably won’t work for yours.

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How I Used Twitter to Increase My Blog’s Traffic by 60% in Two Weeks

Hey y’all, I wanted to update you on my progress on using Twitter as a tool to grow my blog’s traffic.  As I posted last week, I was able to increase my blog’s traffic by 41% in one week by using this method:

1 – Every morning starting at 8am, I would RT a link to a blog post/article every 10 mins, from 8am-10am.

2 – At 8am I would link to the blog post I wrote the previous day.  At 9am I would link to the blog post I wrote THAT day.  I would link to that day’s blog post again at noon and 3pm.

3 – During the day I would link to other interesting blog posts and articles I found or saw other people sharing.

That’s it.  But the main thing is that I started sharing links from 8am-10am, when most people are settling into their desks and getting the work day started.  Next week I might change the timing to coincide with lunch, maybe do it from 11am-1pm.

Anyway, here’s the traffic results I saw.  As I posted last week, traffic increased 41% over the previous week.  Last week, traffic increased another 14% over the previous week’s level:

blog traffic, twitter, increasing traffic, retweets, google analytics

As you can see, big jump in the 2nd week, and a smaller, but still respectable increase last week.  I was honestly hoping to see last week’s traffic increase by 10% over the previous week, so seeing a 14% gain was a pleasant surprise.

Now, by itself, saying traffic increased by 14% last week really isn’t enough to warrant a new blog post.  But something very interesting happened Monday night and I wanted to share that with you.  As I was watching the Daytona 500, at around 9pm or so, there was a bizarre series of events.  First, there was a wreck, and that brought out a caution, and a few trucks came onto the track to clean up the debris.  But as one of the cars (not involved in the wreck) was driving around the track, suddenly something ‘broke’ in its steering, and the car slid out of control, and directly into one of the trucks that was on the track cleaning up the mess!  And this particular truck just so happened to be carrying 200 gallons of jet fuel, so when the car slid into it, it immediately resulted in a huge burst of flames, and it was a miracle it didn’t explode.

But this meant that NASCAR now had an even bigger mess to clean up, and it took about an hour to get the track cleaned up and ready to finish the race.  Two interesting things happened during that hour.  The first is that during the delay, driver Brad Keselowski, who was smart enough to have his phone with him inside his car, took his car out and began live-tweeting the cleanup and what was happening.  Fox, which was carrying the Daytona 500, made several references on air to Brad tweeting, and Brad picked up over 50,000 Twitter followers during the delay.  Great example of Brad capitalizing on the delay.

But when the fire for the truck with the jet fuel was finally put out, it had created a huge sticky mess that needed to be cleaned up.  So how did NASCAR get rid of all that gunk?  By bringing box after box of Tide detergent onto the track!  Tide got an incredibly fortuitous ‘product placement’ during one of the biggest sporting events of the year, and they were a very popular topic among Twitter users at this time.

The problem was, Tide wasn’t active on Twitter at this time, and as I blogged about, their last tweet was several hours prior to the wreck.  It appeared that Tide had stopped tweeting around 5pm, and wasn’t monitoring Twitter that night, and didn’t notice all the free publicity they were getting until the following morning when they finally checked Twitter.

A definite missed opportunity for the brand, and I quickly wrote  a blog post Monday night (while the race was still going) about how Keselowski took advantage of the delay to group his Twitter following, but Tide totally dropped the ball by (apparently) not even monitoring Twitter during the race.  Now I was hoping that this post would be one of the first ones on the events, so I did make sure to optimize it for certain keywords like Twitter, Tide, Daytona 500 and Brad Keselowski, because I was hoping it would pick up some search traffic.  And it definitely did, here’s what my traffic looked like here on Monday (Note the spike at the end of the day when the post went live):

tide, daytona 500, brad keselowski

That spike was almost completely due to search traffic, as everyone was watching Fox mention how many followers Keselowski had picked up, and they were Googling to see what had happened.  Luckily, my post was one of the first ones on the story, in fact I scooped Mashable by 2 hours 😉

And the next morning when ESPN’s Sports Business Reporter Kristi Dosh was doing research for a post she was doing on the race’s events, my post was the #2 result she found for Tide and Daytona 500.  So that led to her contacting and interviewing me for her piece, which ran on ESPN’s site later on Tuesday.  So being proactive and blogging the race’s turn of events not only led to a nice bump in traffic for me on Monday night and Tuesday morning, it also led to me getting interviewed by ESPN.  Not too shabby!

The goal for this week is to again increase traffic by 10% over last week’s levels.  To do that, I’ll need to average almost 600 visitors a day, which would be almost double the traffic I saw here two weeks ago.  But it does prove that by blogging more, and leveraging a site where you are active like Twitter to help promote your blog, that you can quickly grow your blog’s traffic.

If any of you have started using this method for sharing and promoting content on Twitter to drive traffic back to your blog, what have your results been?

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Companies and PR Firms: Here’s the Golden Rule of Pitching Bloggers

Your job is to make my job easier.  Do that, and I’ll give you coverage here every single time.

Let me give you an example:  A couple of years ago my friend Kaitlyn (Note the ‘my friend’ part, PR peeps) at Ogilvy pitched me on an idea she had to get some more exposure for one of Ogilvy’s clients, Ford.  She was attending the 2010 Paris Auto Show where Ford CMO Jim Farley would be, and she pitched a small group of bloggers on this idea:  Give me a question you’d like to ask Ford’s CMO, and I’ll get him to answer you on video.  Hello!  Of course I wanted to be a part of that!

So my question to Jim was:  “Are there any areas that Ford can point to where social media has either lowered business costs, or improved existing processes?”

Jim answered the question, and said that social media had resulted in cost savings of up to 90% versus using traditional advertising in some cases (such as with the Fiesta Movement campaign).  This post also led to Scott Monty jumping in the comments and adding another nugget: “We had a higher level of awareness for the subcompact than for vehicles we had in the market for 2-3 years; we collected over 125,000 hand-raisers who indicated they wanted to learn more when the car became available; and the conversion of reservations to sales was 10X higher than our traditional conversion rate.”

I just checked this blog’s stats, and that post has over 9,300 pageviews and going by pageviews is the fourth most popular post ever on this blog.

And it happened because Kaitlyn was smart enough to position the pitch with the blogger’s needs in mind.

When you are pitching bloggers on your story idea, keep these things in mind:

1 – What topics does the blogger write about?  Actually READ the blog, look at the categories used, or if they have a list of their Most Popular Posts, see what those posts are about.

2 – Look at your story idea, does it jive with the topics that the blogger writes about?  If you’re on the fence as to whether or not its relevant to the blogger, think about what topics the blogger writes about, and how your story idea could tie into the areas the blogger focuses on.  For example, if you have a story idea on how Michaels is using Pinterest to build traffic back to its site, I might not be interested.  But if you tailor the pitch to me and point out that Michaels is activating its brand advocates to use Pinterest to drive traffic back to its site, then my interest in the story increases dramatically.  Always think about how you can make your story idea relevant to the blogger you are pitching.

3 – Don’t follow up repeatedly with the ‘Hey Mack, just wanted to check and see if you somehow missed my story idea the first 10 times I emailed you about it?’ email.  If I don’t respond, there’s at least a 95% chance that it was because I wasn’t interested in covering the story you pitched me on.  If you DO want to email me to followup, you should ASSUME that’s why I didn’t answer you.  You could say something like “Hey Mack, I just wanted to circle back with you on the email I sent on Monday about how Company A is Using Social Media Site B.  Is this something that you feel your readers would be interested in learning more about?  If you don’t think that story would be relevant to your readers, are there any particular areas of social media marketing that you are looking to cover?  My firm represents hundreds of companies that are producing successful social media marketing results, and I’m sure that in the future I could find some examples that you feel would be of value to your readers!”

This approach at least gives me the opportunity to spell out to you exactly what areas I am looking for.

4 – Check to see if the blogger has any guidelines on how they want to be pitched.  Many do, including me.  This alone will save you a ton of time and help you do a better job for your clients.

 

But overall, just think about how your pitch will benefit the blogger you are pitching.  Simply doing that will greatly increase your success rate.  If you’re a blogger that’s gotten pitched before, what’s some great examples that you can share?

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How I Leveraged Twitter to Boost My Blog’s Traffic by 41% Last Week

I’ve blogged before about how you can use Twitter as a tool to drive more attention and exposure to your blog.  I wanted to walk you through how I used Twitter to increase my blog’s traffic last week by 41% over the previous week.

First, I posted 5 times last week, Sunday-Thursday.  On Monday-Thurs, I had a very specific pattern for using Twitter to push traffic back here.

Starting at 8am each morning, I tweeted a link to the previous day’s post here.  Then I went through Google Reader and every 10 mins from 8:10-8:50 I linked to an interesting post or article.  Then at 9:00 am I linked to my new post for that day.  Then starting at 9:10 am I tweeted out a link to another post or article from someone else every 10 mins.  Usually, I stopped at 10 am.

So from 8am-10am, I tweeted a new post or article, every 10 mins.  2 of them were my posts, the rest were posts or articles other people had written.  Then I would again tweet out a link to that day’s post at noon, and again at 3pm.  Also during the day I would RT any interesting links I saw other people sharing.

Here’s what my traffic looked like 2 weeks ago, then last week:

Two weeks ago, I averaged 340 visitors a day here, last week I averaged 479.

Now this strategy works especially well for companies or individuals that are using a blog as a thought leadership tool or to build awareness.  By sharing relevant content on Twitter that’s consistent with the content I create here, there’s several benefits for me:

1 – Sharing valuable content on the same topics as I blog about helps raise my visibility around those topics.

2 – As I am sharing links, more people start paying attention to the links I am sharing, which means more traffic when I share links back here.

3 – As I share links from other bloggers, it increases the chance that they will reciprocate by RTing a link to one of my posts.

 

Now on Friday, I didn’t write a new blog post.  Instead, I RTed a link to the 3 most viewed posts here last week, sending out a tweet to a new post at 9am, noon, and 3pm.  This way, I didn’t have to write a new blog post on either Thurs or Friday, so it freed me up to spend that time working on other projects.

So again, here’s the system I used on Monday-Thursday:

1 – Each day, publish a new post at 8am.

2 – Starting at 8am each day, tweet out a link to a new blog post or article every 10 mins till 10am.  13 links total.

3 – Tweet out the link to the previous day’s post at 8am, the current day’s post at 9am.

4 – Tweet out another link to the current day’s post at noon and again at 3pm.

5 – Throughout the day, RT valuable links that I see others sharing.

 

So if you are looking for a simple way to use Twitter to drive more traffic to your blog and build visibility for yourself, try this simple format.  This is also a good way to take an activity you are already engaging in (reading your feeds in Google Reader) and use that content to build your blog’s traffic as well as your Twitter following.

 

PS: A few minutes ago I got an email offering to ‘sell’ me 10,000 Twitter followers for $5.  As with much in life, real results require real work.

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The Five-Year Engagement’s Blog Proves That Trying to Be Really Real Can Be Really Hard

Blogging, entertainment, Five Year Engagement, movie marketing

I found an interesting bit of movie marketing news yesterday on Emily’s blog.  She mentioned that the social media strategy for the April release The Five-Year Engagement includes a character blog!  I’ve blogged about this for literally five years, but I think character blogs can be an amazingly smart vehicle for movies and television shows.  Done right, it can be a completely immersive (did I just make up another word?) experience that extends the movie/show’s plot, and rewards its fans with a much deeper level of connection and engagement with the central characters.  Seriously, it’s low-hanging fruit that too many media companies completely miss.

So when I saw Tom and Violet’s Our Wedding Blog, I was pretty excited.  The blog is set up as a way for the movie’s two main characters to announce and walk their friends and family through their engagement and upcoming wedding.  The blog has a ton of posts up, written by both Tom and Violet, and so far there’s even a video Tom has created.

Here’s the problem:  You can’t comment on the blog posts.  If you try, you’re greeted with a ‘ Comments are closed! Please sign our Guest Book!‘  explanation.  What’s worse, the characters in the movie leave cutesy comments back and forth to each other in every post, but fans of the movie aren’t allowed to.

It just breaks your heart.  By not allowing fans to comment on the posts, all Universal has accomplished is to lessen the amount of content that fans would create around this movie.  Yes, opening up comments to the masses is going to create a LOT of extra work for the studio.  They can expect to spend hours pouring through comments and moderating them.

But what happens when Leslie, who can’t wait to see this movie, leaves a comment on the blog telling Tom and Violet that she can’t wait  for the wedding…and then sees it on the blog?  Think that might get her excited?  Think that might GREATLY increase the chance that she’ll blog about the movie, tweet about the movie, and mention it on Facebook?

And what if ‘Tom’ or ‘Violet’ actually RESPONDED to her?!?

Universal has in its hands a great opportunity to engage fans of this movie, and give them a reason to create content that will help the studio by increasing exposure and generating ticket sales.  But they either can’t see the potential of letting ‘regular folk’ comment on the blog, or they do see the potential, and don’t think it’s worth devoting a few hours a week to moderating comments.

So close…

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Newsflash: We All Have the Attention Spans of a Gnat, So Blog About That Topic Again!

social media training, mack collier, social media consulting, twitter, blogging, facebook, social media strategyI was listening to an interview that Problogger had on his site (I would link to it but it was his ‘thank you’ for signing up for his newsletter), and he was interviewing a blogger about the success he’s had with his blog.  The blogger said that part of his success was due to a popular ebook he had created that he had achieved monthly sales of up to $30,000!  Impressive, but then the blogger told Darren that roughly 85% of the ebook had come straight from his blog posts.

My mouth literally fell open.  Then Darren remarked that he’d had similar success with an ebook, and that about the same percentage of that ebook’s content had come straight from his blog.

Seriously?!?

But then I thought about it, and it made total sense.  A lot of people would likely pay $9.95 or more for an ebook in order to get the convenience of the information all neatly organized and combined for them in one place. I think too many bloggers have the mindset that once they blog about a topic, it’s ‘off limits’ for them to ever discuss again.

In reality, I think it’s much safer to assume that most people MISS our blog posts.  Or really any content created via social media.  I think social media participation has ‘trained’ us to scan and release.  We give all the content a few seconds to catch our attention, then quickly move on.  When I was creating the recent #Blogchat survey that many of y’all took, I assumed at I could get 250 responses within a couple of days, and eventually get 500 after about a week.  I’d tweet it once, maybe twice a day.

Yeah, not really.  It took 10 days to get 315 responses and that was with me tweeting out begging for responses up to 5 times a day!  At one point within a 90-min period, I tweeted the link and then @MarketingProfs, @ChrisBrogan, @Barefoot_Exec, @JessicaNorthey, @JayBaer and @JasonFalls all RTed the link to the survey, as well.  That’s well over half a million Twitter followers, but do you know how many survey responses I got from that flood?  About 20.  Also, what I noticed every time I tweeted a link to the survey was that I would get about 3-5 responses within 3-5 mins, and then nothing.  This really hit home for me that if something isn’t RIGHT IN FRONT OF US on our social media channels, we miss it.  Plus it also suggests that Twitter isn’t the best medium to drive survey responses, but I digress…

Often I have blogged about topics more than once.  Never once have I had someone tell me ‘Yeah Mack, you blogged about this before, why are you covering it again?’

Now that doesn’t mean that you should simply repost an old post.  But it DOES mean that you should dig into your archives and find your ‘old’ popular topics, and resurrect them.  Remember yesterday when I talked about your blog’s analytics and using Pageviews and Search Keywords to help you discover popular posts?  Do that, find the posts that others are enjoying, and see if you can write a new post or two about those same topics.  Just this afternoon, I went through the Archives for the posts I wrote here back in 2009, and found 10 posts I can update and expand and republish as new posts.  If I can do the same for 2010 and 2011, I’ve suddenly created a new 30 or so posts for myself to publish here!

There’s no reason why you can’t do the same.  Dig in your archives and see if you have any buried blogging treasure in there that you can share again (or really for the first time) with your readers.  It will also lighten your blogging workload, and who knows, you may even find enough good stuff to make your own ebook and get your own $30,000 a month income!

PS:  I’ve written about this topic before as well, and I’ll forgive you if you missed it the first time 🙂

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The Beginner’s Guide to Blog Analytics

Analytics is an area that a lot of bloggers don’t pay as much attention to as they should.  And while I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to super-advanced analytics-tracking, I did want to give y’all a general overview of getting analytics tracking set up on your blog and some of the main metrics you should be looking at.

First, you’ll need to add a statistics tracker to your blog.  You can get a premium service if you want, but there’s plenty of free options that should be just fine for the average blogger.  On this blog, I use SiteMeter and Google Analytics to track my blog’s statistics.  Both of these services require you adding a snippet of HTML code to your blog’s template in order to ‘register’ the information about your blog’s visitors.  Now at one time, this could be a pain in the ass, especially if you weren’t comfortable editing your blog’s template coding.  Luckily, it’s gotten a lot easier now to do this.

For SiteMeter, you’ll need to first sign up for a free account, and then SiteMeter will give you the code you need to add to your blog’s template.  If you are comfortable doing the coding yourself, all you’ll need to do is take the HTML code SiteMeter gives you, and put it right before your template’s closing </BODY> tag.  If you have no earthly idea what I just said, don’t worry, you can click this link for a tutorial.  Or to make it even easier, you can do what I did, I took the code and created a new text-based widget on my sidebar, and added it there.  Simple as can be.

The second way I track my blog’s analytics is with Google Analytics.  As with SiteMeter, this requires adding a snippet of code to your blog’s template.  You’ll again need to sign up for an account with Google Analytics, and then take the code they provide and add it to your blog’s template.  I used a plugin to do this for this blog, Yoast’s  Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin.  That link will show you some of the additional functionality you can get from using the plugin.  But again, if you are comfortable tweaking your blog’s template, you can probably add the GA code manually without much problem.

There are other services you can use, but these are the two I use here.  Now in general, I use SiteMeter to track real-time visitor information, and I use Google Analytics to look at trends over time.  Even with the new version of Google Analytics and it’s Real-Time dashboard, I still get more detailed information from SiteMeter, especially on individual visitors.

Now I wanted to give y’all an overview of first some of the ‘basic’ metrics you should be looking at, and then I wanted to walk you through some of the metrics that I spend more time looking at.

Traffic.  Everyone loves to look at their traffic.  But besides being an ego-gush, there’s some very valid reasons to pay close attention to your traffic.  First, you want to see how it’s trending over time.  For example, if your traffic was down 33% in January of this year versus January of 2011, it helps to try to figure out why that decrease happened.

Also, looking at your traffic can give you great clues about when you should be publishing new posts.  For example, here’s what the traffic looks like here over the last 30 days according to SiteMeter:

Note the red Xs.  Those are coming on Saturdays.  Also notice, those traffic levels are the low points for each week.  So that alone tells me that if I want my new posts to get maximum exposure, I probably shouldn’t publish them on Saturday!  But as with anything else on your blog, you still should TEST this!  In my case, I have published posts on Saturday, and the traffic level for those posts was below what similar posts have gotten that were published here during the week.  But still, you need to test to verify your assumptions.

And like many of you, I use Twitter as a tool to help promote my blog posts.  I also know from watching my traffic closely that during the week, the hourly traffic is very low here each day till around 8am, when it starts to increase through the middle of the day till around 3pm, when it starts to fall again.  So when I publish a new blog post, I try to run it at 8am.  For example, I am writing this post on Saturday and Sunday, but will publish it at 8am on Monday morning.  Then, I will schedule a few tweets to promote it during the day, starting at 9am.  I schedule the first tweet for an hour later because typically I will have a couple of comments come in from blog subscribers that see the post as soon as it goes live at 8am.

Then, I will tweet a link out to it at 9am, then again at noon, and finally at 3pm or so.  Now I know from tracking the traffic in the past that I will get a bump in traffic from Twitter for each time I share a link to this new post.  I also know from watching my traffic patterns in the past that the tweet at noon will likely send more traffic here than the tweets at 9am or 3pm.  I assume this is because more people are taking lunch and checking Twitter from their desk at work.

BTW, here’s a detailed post on how I used this strategy to increase my traffic here by 300% and email subscribers by 900% in ONE week.

So in general, you should know what your traffic levels are on a monthly, weekly, daily and hourly basis.  That way if there’s a change good or bad, you should be able to spot it immediately, and then you can investigate to figure out what triggered the change.

Search Traffic.  Now along with traffic, I also pay very close attention to Search Traffic.  The reason why is simple: If someone uses search to find my blog, they probably do not know who I am, and they probably are trying to solve a business problem.  I’ll talk about this a bit more below, but by looking at keywords, I can see what people are looking for when they arrive here.  For example, I know that a lot of people arrive here by looking for information on the pricing for social media marketing services.  That’s because since 2010, I’ve been doing an annual recap of How Much Companies Should Expect to Pay for Social Media.  Last year when I realized how much search traffic was being sent to those posts, I went back and added in a link to my Social Media Marketing Rate Sheet.  Since doing that, I’ve gotten several work inquiries that have specifically mentioned a service and price listed on my Rate Sheet, which was buried on here before I added them to those posts.  Just last week, a major organization emailed me wanting to inquire about one of my services and referenced seeing it listed on my Rate Sheet.

Now should you care about Search Traffic?  Well I think the answer is ‘Yes’, but also note that I care more because this blog is a tool I use to grow my business.  But even if your blog is a personal one, search can help you get found by people that share your interests, which means you can make some new friends, if you aren’t interested in attracting new clients.  If you want to increase your search traffic, there’s two ways that I have found that have worked for me: Post more often, and optimize your posts for search engines.  Here’s a beginner’s guide on how to optimize your posts for search engines.

Referral Traffic.  This tells me what sources are sending traffic to my blog.  For example, it could be Twitter or Facebook, or a link that someone has put on their blog.  It can also help you identify sudden increases in traffic.  For example, if you see that within the last 5 minutes you’ve got as much traffic as you usually get in 5 hours, you can click the referral sources of that traffic, and that will usually tell you where that surge of traffic is coming from.  Often, it will be a new link that someone has posted on their blog, or maybe a popular Twitter user just tweeted out a link to one of your posts.

This also really helps you determine where you should be spending your time promoting your blog, on other sites.  For example, if you see that Facebook is sending your blog 1% of its traffic, but Plus is sending it 8%, then that’s probably a good indicator that your posts are more popular when they are shared on Plus.  A good way to test this is to share your new post on different sites at the same time, and tracking the referral traffic.  For example, if you write a new post tomorrow, share a link to it on Plus, Facebook, and Twitter at 11am on each site, and then track how much traffic each link sends back to your blog.  This is a ‘quick n dirty’ way to test how engaged your network is on each of these sites.

Pageviews for top posts.  This is a great way to tell which posts are most popular on your blog.  Here’s a list of the Top 10 most popular pages on this blog via Pageviews, over the last month:

Note that the top four pages on this blog all deal with the price of social media services.  That tells me that people are hungry for that type of information.

Search Keywords people use to find your blog.  This is really important because it not only gives you better insight into what posts are most popular, but also the search keywords are more about what topics people are interested in.  Also, remember that a lot of people ask search engines questions.  Look at this list of the most popular search keywords here over the last month:

Note that the #6 search term is ‘How to Write Your First Blog Post’.  I actually wrote a blog post with that exact post title.  I’ve talked about this before, but when you write your post titles, think about how people would find your post if they Googled it.  We often Google a question we are looking for the answer to.

Now note that the #1 search term for the last month is ‘social media crisis management’.  Also, looking at the picture above the one above, we see that the post I wrote on social media crisis management is the 7th most popular here in the last month.  That suggests to me that ‘social media crisis management’ is a topic that I may want to consider blogging about again soon.

Now paying close attention to your stats can also give you clues about the type and even FORM of content your visitors enjoy.

For example, here’s a screenshot of the 10 most viewed posts here in the last month from my Direct Traffic, which are usually visitors that came here directly from putting in the URL:

Note the two red circles:  The avg time spend on those two posts is 2:13, whereas the other posts are as low as 5 seconds?  Why is the avg time spend on those particular two posts so much higher?  I think part of the reason why is because both of those posts either have a video or audio file in them.  But I can’t be sure because the post inbetween them on Social Media Crisis Management also has a video embedded, and yet people are spending over a minute LESS time on it.

But this is a good example of why it pays to pay close attention to your blog’s statistics, so that you can better understand how visitors are finding, and interacting with your content.  Investing some time now to better understand blog analytics will not only save you time down the road, it will also make you a better blogger!  If you have any additional questions about your blog’s analytics, please leave a comment and I’ll try to help you!

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My 5 Favorite WordPress Plugins

Tomorrow night (Sunday) we’ll be chatting about our favorite blog plugins at #Blogchat.  The discussion will start at 8pm Central, and if you’ve never joined #Blogchat, here’s what it’s all about.

To prep for that discussion, I wanted to share with y’all my five favorite WordPress plugins. These are for the WordPress.org or Self-Hosted blogs.  You can find these by going to the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard and searching for them.

5 – Comment Luv.  I love this plugin because it rewards commenters.  When you leave a comment, it gives you the option to add a link to a recent blog post you’ve written.  Most bloggers are looking to get more comments and interaction on their blogs, and this plugin does a great job of encouraging your readers to leave more comments.

4 – Akismet.  Gotta have this plugin, as it blocks spam comments and trackbacks.  I just checked and it says it’s blocked over 55,000 spam comments left here since 2009.  Very rarely does a spam comment get through, we’re talking like 5 times a year, maybe.

3 – Sociable.  Lets you customize which sharing options you put for each post.  Now there is a caveat here because you don’t want to give your readers TOO many options, for example I see some bloggers that use this plugin that give readers sharing options for like 30 different sites.  Fewer is better, pick the top 5 or so sites where you want to distribute your content.

2 – Popular Posts.  This plugin displays your most popular posts (based primarily on views), and is a great way to draw exposure to older posts.  More than once it’s given this blog massive traffic spikes when another site picks up one of the posts served up by the plugin.

1 – Comment Redirect.  This plugin lets you redirect first-time commenters to any page you chose.  I send first-time commenters to this page where I thank them for commenting.  Just a way to let commenters know I appreciate them, and I also include some links so they can get more information on the blog and about me.  I get about an email a week from someone that tells me that it was a very nice touch to be thanked for commenting!

 

So that’s my 5 favorite WordPress plugins.  What are yours?  Please share them in the comments and don’t forget to join us on Sunday at 8pm Central at #Blogchat and we’ll discuss them more then!

 

UPDATE: Here’s the transcript to tonight’s #Blogchat if you missed it, a ton of great info and suggestions on blog plugins, thanks to everyone that came!

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How to Make the Most of Your Next Social Media or Marketing Conference Experience

#blogchat, Live #blogchat

Too often, when companies research conferences to decide if they should attend, they only look at the program.  While the program is probably the most important element to any conference, the value of an event extends far past the agenda.  And in order to tap into all the value a conference can offer, you need to realize that you aren’t going to a conference just to learn.  In fact, you need to realize that you’re going to a conference to play three roles:

1 – You are going to learn.

2 – You are going to network.

3 – You are going to create content.

Let’s look at each now:

Attending a conference to learn – This sounds like a no-brainer, of course you are attending a conference to learn, why else would you go?  But the mistake that too many companies make is they send someone to attend the conference, typically an entry or mid-level employee, and tell them to take as much notes as possible.  So that’s exactly what they do, and they don’t learn very much, because instead of paying attention to the speakers, they were too busy taking notes.  So when they get back to the office and the boss asks what she learned at the event, she drops a pile of notes on the boss’ desk, which are then typed up and distributed to the team.  Congrats, you just paid $2,000 for information you could have gotten from reading a few blogs!

When deciding who should attend an event, send the people that would most benefit from learning while there.  Don’t send them so they can store as much information as possible to regurgitate to the team when they get back.  Send them so THEY can learn, and explain to them that the event is for their benefit.  I guarantee you that if they can focus on what they can learn from the conference, they’ll come back to the office with MUCH better information to share with the team, because they will have paid attention and actually LEARNED something.  This is another reason why you send Social Media Managers and CMOs/Brand Managers vs ‘the marketing/social media guy’ you hired last week.

Networking while at a conference – Let’s be honest, many of us HATE to network.  Especially if you’re an introvert like me.  But with proper planning, the networking process can not only be a much smoother experience, it can be very beneficial to your company!

The first thing to do is start researching WHO will be at the event as soon as possible.  Now the event itself probably won’t release a list of attendees, but for bigger events especially, there will typically be attendees interacting on social media sites prior to the event.  Often, these attendees will be using a hashtag in association with the event (if they are on Twitter), which makes them even easier to find.  Some events, like Blog World Expo, even have chats on Twitter in the weeks leading up to their events which is a fabulous way to make connections so that when you arrive at the conference, you already know some people!

Now as I said, I am an introvert, and I absolutely HATE networking.  Seriously, I am really uncomfortable meeting and connecting with strangers.  But when I attended SXSW last year, I had an amazing time and it was mostly due to the networking I did during the few days I was in Austin.  Starting in January, I began seeing who was attending SXSW, and made a list of the people I wanted to connect with.  Then I contacted these people and set up one-on-one meetings with them.  It worked fabulously!  In years past, I would have seen that a person I wanted to connect with would be attending, and just thought ‘oh well I am sure I will bump into them in the hallways, and I can say hi then!’  And then of course if I did see them, I never would introduce myself.  But with this approach, I met them in a one-on-one setting, which was much more comfortable for me as an introvert, and it was a big reason why SXSW was such a success for me last year.

Now on the flipside, Blog World was a networking disaster for me, because I didn’t follow that same plan.  I spent almost all of my time working on making sure that the Live #Blogchat during Blog World was a success (and it was!), that I didn’t focus as much on networking. So I had fewer meetings, and found myself seeing people I wanted to connect with in a crowd, and not feeling comfortable connecting with them.  I know Lisa Petrilli advises these one-on-one meetings for introverts as a great way to network as well.

So with some prior planning, your conference experience can also lead to some valuable networking with potential clients, customers, and partners!

Creating content at a conference – This is where I think many companies totally miss the boat when it comes to attending conferences.  There is SO much value that can be extracted from creating content at an event.  You can take pictures, and then share those pictures with your audiences on your blog and Twitter followers.  You can do recap posts with fellow attendees and especially conference organizers absolutely LOVE!

And a big advantage is, you can do interviews with speakers and attendees.  Let’s say you work for an SEO firm that has a blog.  You’re blogging every day about best SEO practices, but guess what, so is every other SEO firm.  But let’s say you attend a Social Media event and Google’s Matt Cutts is speaking.  If you could snag 5 mins with Matt to interview him about the state of SEO and then post that on your blog, do you think that MIGHT get your firm’s blog some new attention?  Of course it would.  And if you don’t have the ability to do a video interview, get a voice recorder (I use this one from Olympus) and do an audio interview.  But if you have an iPhone, you should be able to do either a video or audio interview.  Tom Martin has been creating amazing video interviews for years with just his iPhone.

Whenever I attend events I am always looking for ways to create additionally content, and if nothing else, I try to always do a recap post, to share what I learned and my impressions of the event.  And let me tell you, these posts are very popular with event organizers, in fact when I arrive an event, they will often connect with me and ask me if I will be doing a recap post 😉

So there’s some ideas to help you get the most out of your next conference experience.  Really, as high as fees and travel costs are these days, you can’t afford to just go to an event and take notes for 8 hours, then leave.  But if you go realizing that you are there to learn, network, and create content, the overall value you get from your next conference can make the price you pay to get there, a bargain.