MackCollier.com

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 25: Four Secrets to Creating a Business Blog Readers Will Love

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 25th episode of #FanDamnShow! In today’s episode I talk about the four things your company should do to create a blog that readers love!

PPC_200x200 Standard no codeBut before I get into the Show Notes, a special thank you to MarketingProfs for becoming The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show’s first sponsor!  This episode is brought to you by the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, from Marketing Profs.  The Marketing Writing Bootcamp begins on June 11th and features 13 classes with almost 8 hours of instruction!  You can learn more here about the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and if you enroll with promo code FANDAMN you’ll save $200 on Marketing writing bootcamp. Plus, you’ll get over $1,000 worth of Marketing Profs seminars, classes, and video tutorials, free – just for registering!

The Marketing Writing Bootcamp will be the sponsor of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show for the next 2 months.  If your company is interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow, slots are available starting in July.  You can learn more about sponsoring The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show and get rates by clicking here.

And a special congratulations to Kerry Gorgone (who does an amazing job on the opener/closer for #FanDamnShow), who appeared last night as a legal expert for a segment on NBC Nightly News! You can view Kerry’s segment here, and visit her website too!  I’m so happy for Kerry!

Show Notes:

2:42 – The importance of creating reader-centric content, and how it can actually be a better way to promote your business than ‘brochure-ware’.

10:15 – All engagement is not created equally.  How to decide what type of engagement ties to your goals for your blog and what actions you want readers to take on your blog.

12:30 – Reward your readers for engaging in the behavior that you are trying to encourage

15:53 – The power of saying ‘Thank You’ to your readers and creating a culture of appreciation

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

Also, don’t forget that sponsorships are now available for The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show. This page that has all the information on how your brand can sponsor #FanDamnShow and the rates. Please note that all available sponsor slots (starting with July) will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, so please email me if you are interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow.

We’ll talk again next week!

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How Visit Philly Leverages Analytics to Improve its Content Marketing

VisitPhillyPost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For April

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

First, here were my goals for April:

Blog – At least 62,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,500 downloads

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

My blog traffic in April was 40,980 visitors, averaging 1,366 visitors a day.  In March, the blog’s traffic was 48,901, averaging 1,577 a day.  So this is another big traffic dip after one in March as well.  If you’ve been following these monthly updates, you know that in February I made some backend changes to the blog.  I switched from Godaddy’s shared to managed WordPress hosting, and I deleted a ton of plugins.  The upside to these moves is that site performance, especially load times, was greatly improved.  Avg load times for the site went from about 6 seconds before, to around 2-3 seconds now.  Unfortunately, as soon as I made these changes, I noticed that traffic started dropping, especially search traffic.  Here’s how each category of traffic did in April vs March:

Search traffic – Down 6%

Direct traffic – Down 24%

Referral – Down 9%

Social – Down 80%

Email – Up 133%

One of the reasons why I wanted to do this monthly update on my blog traffic and podcast audience numbers is that it forces me to learn exactly why any numbers are moving up or down.  Lets look at each of the numbers above:

First, search traffic is down 6%, although that’s not as much as it dropped from February to March.  In fact, let’s look at the last four weeks of April vs the last four weeks of March as far as search traffic:

BlogSearchTrafficApril

Now when you look at search traffic this way, search traffic for April was actually fractionally above search traffic in March.  Here’s why (I think): As I said, in February I made a lot of backend changes, and almost as soon as I did, search traffic started falling.  One of the changes I made was to deactivate the JetPack plugin.  So I added it back (around April 3rd), and noticed when I did that one of the services the Jetpack plugin has is ‘Enhanced Distribution’, which Jetpack describes as “Jetpack will automatically take the great published content from your blog or website and share it instantly with third party services like search engines, increasing your reach and traffic.”

As soon as I reactivated Jetpack, I noticed a slight tick up in search traffic.  So I am cautiously optimistic that search traffic will increase in May.

Direct traffic was also down, but I think with the way Google Analytics reports that a lot of the traffic it classifies as direct is actually search.  An example of why I believe this is the Direct traffic GA reported for this page, creating a brand ambassador program.  This is actually a page here, not a post, and it’s not easy to find (I need to change that). But if you google the term ‘creating a brand ambassador program’, it’s one of the top results.  And in March it had 33 visitors, and in April that shot up to 121 visitors.  So who knows?

Referral traffic is down 9% but I’m not too worried about that since referral traffic from the top 4 sources were up and 7 of the top 10.

Social traffic was way down, but that’s because I stopped sharing as many links to my posts on Twitter last month.  At one point a few weeks ago I was tweeting out links to my articles every 30 minutes all day.  I did that mainly as an experiment to see how much social traffic would jump and it did.  But it also began to honk off some of my followers to see so many links so I scaled back to one or 2 a day now.

Email jumped, but it was mostly from one post on 4-12-2015 about making your blog mobile-friendly and the #Blogchat topic.

I wrote 12 posts in April, versus 13 in March.  The goal for May is to get up at least 16 posts.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for April

While blog traffic was down sharply last month, podcast downloads spiked sharply in April.

The goal for April was at least 1,500 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 3,784 downloads in April. HUGE numbers.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

Podcast DLs April
 As you can see, nice gains in March and even greater gains in April.  I’m beyond thrilled with the growth of the podcast.

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

Blog traffic – At least 65,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,000 downloads

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

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

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Is Your Blog Ready For Google’s Mobile Search Update?

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the transcript for this #Blogchat.

Tonight at #Blogchat (4-12-2015) we will be discussing the changes that Google is about to roll out that are aimed at rewarding sites that are Mobile Friendly.  These changes will start to take affect on 4-21-2015, or Tuesday of next week.

Here’s where you can read about what these changes mean on Google’s webmaster blog.  In short, it seems that the main change will be that sites/blogs that google deems to be ‘mobile-friendly’ will rank higher than similar sites/blogs that are not mobile-friendly in google’s eyes.

You can use this site from google to check and see if google sees your blog as being mobile-friendly.

First, what does ‘mobile-friendly’ mean anyway?  In short, it means that your blog adapts to whatever device being used to view it, to present an adequate viewing experience.  For example, have you ever tried to view a blog on a smartphone and it looks like a smaller version of the entire website?  And you have to expand the text with your fingers to read any of it?  That’s an example of a blog that’s NOT mobile-friendly.  This is also called having a responsive design/theme/template for your blog.  It means your blog adapts to the device you are using to present text in a way that can be easily read.

Second, is google going to penalize my blog starting on 4-21-2015 if it’s not mobile-friendly?  Well, yes and no.  I think it’s more accurate to say this latest update from Google is more about rewarding mobile-friendly blogs that it is about penalizing ones that aren’t.  If you go now to your smartphone and do a google search, you’ll see that when you look at the results, some of the sites will have MOBILE FRIENDLY under their entry.  This is telling you that since you are on a mobile device, that these sites will give you an optimal viewing experience.  So the odds are that you will click a mobile-friendly result moreso than one that isn’t.  Additionally, Google has said that starting on 4-21-2015, it will begin using whether a site is mobile-friendly or not as one of its ‘ranking signals’.  Meaning that Google will start to consider if a site is mobile-friendly or not as one of the criteria when it ranks sites for results.  Will this only apply for search results on mobile devices, or all devices?  I’m not sure, maybe someone could chime in?

What are your options if your blog is NOT mobile-friendly?

If your blog is NOT mobile-friendly and you want to make it so, then you will want to either switch to a responsive theme, or make some alteration to your existing theme/site to make it responsive.

The first thing I would do is go to your Google Analytics and see how much of your blog’s traffic is currently coming from mobile devices.  For my blog, about 33% of my site’s traffic is from mobile.  That number is too big to ignore, so over the weekend I made some tweaks to my theme (Thesis) to make it responsive, and mobile-friendly in Google’s eyes.  If your blog is only getting 5% of its traffic from mobile devices, then you might decide to wait and see how your traffic changes on 4-21-2015 (if it does at all) before you make any changes.

Before changing themes, I would check to see if there are any options for making your existing theme responsive.  For example, I am running Thesis 1.8.6 here, and I found out there IS a way to make this theme responsive.  I did so by adding this responsive skin (so if you have Thesis 1.8.x, you can use it to make your blog responsive).  I would google your theme and see if there are any options for making it responsive.

If you do decide to change themes (and your blog is a self-hosted WordPress blog), keep in mind that WordPress 4.0 came with the Twenty-Fifteen theme, which is a responsive theme.  It’s a very simple and no-frills theme, but switching to it should make your blog mobile-friendly and ready for Google’s upcoming changes.

Also, Copyblogger has a nice write-up on what this change could mean for your blog.

So join us tonight at 8pm Central at #blogchat to discuss these changes and how to get your blog ready!  If you haven’t joined #blogchat before, here’s what it’s all about.

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For March

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

First, here were my goals for February:

Blog – At least 58,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,100 downloads

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

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

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

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

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

Search traffic – Down 13%

Direct traffic – Up 3.5%

Social traffic – Up 254%

Referral traffic – Up 4%

 

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

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

Podcast Numbers and Overview for March

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

Goal for March: At least 1,100 downloads

Actual downloads: 1,547

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

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

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

Blog – At least 62,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,500 downloads

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

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

 

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A Very Simple Template to Decide What Content to Create For Your Business Blog

The other night during #Blogchat, Josh left these tweets about his business:

JoshTweets3So Josh is in a situation where he is shifting from providing dog training services, to focusing on manufacturing products for dog owners and likely dog trainers.  He wants to know how to create content that promotes the products he’s manufacturing, but one that isn’t too ‘salesy’ and that still covers topics related to dog training.

This is a problem that a lot of companies face:  How do we create content that does two very crucial things simultaneously:

1 – Promotes our products

2 – Engages readers

Too many companies make sure they nail the promotion aspect of their content, and effectively create a blog that houses an endless stream of commercials disguised as blog posts.  The irony of this approach is that by nailing the first point, the company ensures that its content will NOT engage readers.  Any content that comes across to the reader as being promotion, is immediately tuned out.

So then how do we walk the tightrope of creating content that has value for the company (promotes your products) while at the same time having value for the reader?

It’s actually very easy to do this.  Let’s go back to Josh’s example.  What most companies would want to do is talk directly about the products that Josh is manufacturing for dog owners and trainers.

The secret, is to instead create content about how (and why) your customers will use the product.  Think about your ideal customer.  Who are they, and what problems are they trying to solve by buying this product?  Think about how your product fits into their lives, and blog about that.  This is what the customer wants to know, she wants to know how your product is going help them solve a particular problem, or help them with a particular task, or help them accomplish something.

You don’t want to blog about your product directly, instead, you want to blog about how your product fits into your customer’s life.  That’s how you create content that engages your customer.

If you’re still skeptical, consider that Facebook did a study in 2012 where it analyzed the content created on the site’s most popular brand pages.  The goal was to discover what type of content created by these brands drove the highest levels of engagement.  Facebook found that the type of content that drove the highest engagement levels was content related to but not ABOUT the brand.  Content that directly promoted the brand underperformed, but content related to the brand was more customer-centric, and as a result it resonated more with customers.  Same thing here: Content related to your brand and how your brand/product relates to your customer is customer-centric, which means it is content that customers will find more engaging.

And here’s the secret: Creating engaging content about how your product relates to your customer is the best promotion for your product! 

A great way to get an idea of how to create content that appeals to your customers (but that also relates to your products) is to answer the questions that your customers are asking.  What questions do they have about your product?  About the proper way to use your product?  These questions give you key insights into who your customers are, and how your product could improve their lives.

So here’s the template:

1 – Take your product

2 – Don’t blog directly about the product. Instead, blog about the ways that your customer would use your product, and the reasons why they would use your product.  The idea is, you want to blog about how the product fits into your customer’s life, versus just the product itself.

Because if you blog directly about the product, your potential customers will view it as a commercial, and tune it out.  But if you blog about your customers instead, and how your product could fit into their lives, then the content becomes far more interesting and relevant to those customers!

And here’s the real secret.  I’ve followed this same template in this blog post.  This post was written to create value for companies that need help crafting a content strategy for their blog and online marketing efforts.  These companies are the type of companies I want to work with and help advise on creating a content strategy.  So in essence, this post becomes a promotion for my content consulting, but it doesn’t come across as a commercial, because the post creates value (hopefully) for companies that need clarity around their content strategies. If your company needs advice on how to craft a content strategy for your blog, please email me and let’s discuss your needs!

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What Every Blogger Wishes You Knew About Pitching Them

J0284982

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Here’s why this strategy never works:

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For February

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

First, here were my goals for February:

Blog – At least 54,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 850 downloads

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

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

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

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

Here’s where my traffic came from in February:

Organic Search – 81.3%

Direct – 11.3%

Referral – 4.1%

Social – 3%

Email – 0.3%

 

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

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

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

There were two main reasons for the slow load times:

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Podcast Numbers and Overview for February      

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

Goal for February – At least 850 downloads.

Actual number of downloads for February – 574

Oops.  This wasn’t even close.

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

PodcastNumbersFeb

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

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

Blog – At least 58,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,100 downloads.

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

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What You Can Learn From My Record Blog Traffic Yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChannelTraffic1

Three things immediately jump off this graph to me:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For January

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

First, here were my goals for January:

Blog – Traffic of at least 50,000 visitors.

Podcast – At least 750 downloads.

 

Breakdown of My Blog Traffic

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

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

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

Detailed Analysis of Traffic Sources

Here’s where my traffic came from in January:

Organic Search – 83.46%

Direct – 9.15%

Referral – 4.19%

Social – 2.93%

Email – 0.19%

Other – 0.08%

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

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

Average time a visitor spends on this blog – 47 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Numbers and Overview 

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

Goal for January – At least 750 downloads

Actual number of downloads for January – 737

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

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

PodcastTraffic

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

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

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

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

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

Blog – At least 54,000 visitors.

Podcast – At least 850 downloads.

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