MackCollier.com

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Texts to Twitter, Instagram’s NFT Integration, Podcast Listening Dips in 2022

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you are having a great fall as we are now in October!  This is my favorite month of the year!  I love the weather, I love the colors, the falling leaves, and Halloween!  The best time of the year, in my opinion!  Here’s 3 marketing/business/web3 stories I read over the last week that caught my eye:

 

The Twitter account @techemails is absolutely fascinating.  They release text messages that have been made public via the proper filings.  Recently, they shared some text messages that Elon had with both Twitter’s current CEO as well as one an exchange with one of its co-founders, Jack Dorsey.  Dorsey’s comments about regretting that Twitter became a company were very telling. Dorsey said that Twitter should have stayed a protocol. One of the issues that has dogged Twitter throughout its history is its rocky relationship with developers. Often, Twitter would encourage developers to build apps and functionality on top of its platform, then either cut off API access with no warning, or buy an app, then cut off API access to any apps with competing functionality.  For instance, years ago Twitter bought livestreaming app Periscope, integrated it into the platform, then cut off competitor Meerkat (which was arguably more popular at the time) from having API access.  Twitter bought Tweetdeck, cutting off competitors like Twirl, and bought Summize, hurting competitors as well.

Elon seemed very intrigued by Dorsey’s vision of having Twitter as a protocol and wants to pursue moving the platform more toward decentralization. In my opinion that could only happen if Twitter went private. Even then, it would be messy.

 

Meta recently announced that it will allow Instagram and Facebook users to integrate their existing NFTs with the platform.  Why is this important? My guess is Meta would like to eventually develop an NFT marketplace.  Adding a shopping functionality to the sharing of NFTs would give creators another revenue stream, but it would also do the same for Meta, as it would likely want a cut of sales.

 

Podcasting listening is projected by Edison Research to dip slightly in 2022.  This is a bit surprising, but as Edison points out in its findings, the dip for 2022 still puts listening levels at marginally higher than 2020 levels.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute.  Apologies for the late arrival of this post, seems there were some issues with my hosting service.  Will have a pretty interesting post up on Weds (again assuming no more site issues), so try to check it out in 2 days.

Hope you have a wonderful week, you deserve it!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Learfield’s Huge Splash Into NFTs, Spotify Passes Apple For Podcasts, Surprising Email Stats

Happy Monday! Let’s talk about 3 stories that I noticed from the marketing, business and web3 worlds over the last week:

 

This is a big deal, and a story that’s continuing to develop, so you can get up to speed as it happens. Learfield, which partners with many of the top colleges and universities on athletic broadcasts, will be partnering with Recur Forever to launch a portal/marketplace for NFTs focused on college athletes. The portal, NFTU.com, will launch on March 14th, one week from today.  You can learn more about the portal and sponsorship here. There’s so many potential in this deal, it will be fun to see how this partnership evolves and NFTU.com could quickly grow into a competitor to OpenSea and LooksRare in the NFT marketplace space.

 

In 2021, Spotify passed Apple to be the top destination for podcast listeners. I think this is a sign of the growing popularity of Spotify and it’s move into hosting podcasts. Also, Apple podcast locks you into using Apple products whereas Spotify can be used across competing devices from Google and Samsung, among others.

 

I thought this was interesting, Marketing Charts reports that email marketing converts at a similar rate on both desktop and mobile devices.  This is where I think it gets interesting; Even though the conversion rates are the same for desktop and mobile, marketers surveyed said open rates and click rates were actually better on mobile! Yet when it comes to converting, desktop matched mobile users.

What does that mean? I think it suggests that we are more likely to read and click on an email on our phone because we are more likely to use our phone for email.  We are out and about, we have our phones with us at all times.  It’s the convenience factor. But a conversion usually requires a bit more attention and time, and that’s where the desktop usage comes into play.  I suspect in many cases users are opening and reading on their phones, then saving to investigate later on their desktops, and that’s when the conversion is happening.  Good stats to keep in mind as you are planning your next email marketing campaign!

 

So that’s it for this week’s Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a chance this week to get out and enjoy some of the Spring weather that is starting to pop up across the country!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Spotify Launches Greenroom, Apple Podcast Subscriptions Go Worldwide, More States Adopting NIL Laws

Happy Monday! Hope you have a wonderfully productive week planned! Here’s a few marketing and business stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

 

Spotify has launched its social audio competitor, Greenroom. I haven’t tried out Greenroom yet, but have noticed it’s getting some positive publicity on social media. Two big differences between Greenroom and other social audio apps is that room hosts can turn on Live Chat on Greenroom, and they can also request audio of a room after the session ends.  This audio can then be taken and used as a podcast episode, for instance.  I do wonder how this will be integrated with the standalone Spotify app, as it seems a natural to use Greenroom as a way for fans of music artists to create rooms to discuss their passion for a particular artist on Greenroom.  For instance, if a user listens to three songs in a row by Foster the People, Spotify could put up a popup inviting users to check out rooms created in Greenroom by fans of that band. And let’s be honest, that dark green color scheme is sick, especially compared to the bland whiteness of the Clubhouse app.

 

Apple’s Podcast Subscriptions are now live worldwide in more than 170 countries.  Subscriptions give podcast subscribers access to additional material, as well as early access to upcoming episodes in some cases.  Apple will get a 30% cut of the revenue from podcast hosts in year one.

 

This is another story that’s just going to take on a life of its own in the coming months and years.  NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) laws are set to go into effect in several more states on July 1st.  These include big-time college football states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Texas. NIL laws give college athletes much more freedom to work with brands directly and take on sponsorships.  You will be seeing a LOT more brand-oriented content from college athletes, the type of content you really wouldn’t see previously until athletes had exhausted their college eligibility.  Kristi has been all over this story for months and her site has all the info on what NIL laws will mean for brands and college athletes.

 

That’s all for this week! Hope you have a wonderful week, and try to stay cool, Summer is here!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Podcasts Thrived in 2020, Year’s Top Search Terms, Fast Food in Pompeii??

Happy New Year, y’all! Welcome to 2021! Time to turn the page and start into a new year and I am ready for it! I bet you are as well! Before we get to today’s Marketing Minute, tomorrow night’s #ContentCircus will discuss how to do a content audit. It’s a process I’m going through now, and we will be discussing tomorrow night at 7pm Central on Twitter. Additionally, I will have a VERY robust post up here tomorrow on my process for auditing content. It will tie in nicely with tomorrow night’s #ContentCircus, so look for that as well. As they say in the circus, on with the show!

 

This surprises me a bit, but podcasts continued to have remarkable growth in 2020. Downloads surged by almost 50%, and spending on podcast ads hit a whopping $780 Million! There was some concerns that growth of podcasts might slow in 2020 as we spent more time at home, and less time driving to work. But the stellar growth of the format in 2020 proves that we love listening to our podcasts, and not just while driving to work.

 

It’s always interesting to look back at the top search terms for the year. As expected, most of the terms revolved around the pandemic and how it has impacted our lives and daily workflow. One of the big topics I’ve talked about here the last few months is how customer behavior will change as a result of spending more time working from home. I think the shift in search term usage reflects that.

 

Ok, it’s hard to restart from a nice Christmas break, even for the Marketing Minute! I thought this discovery of an ancient ‘fast food stand’ in Pompeii was absolutely fascinating! And look at the artwork on the site of the stand! It’s two thousand years old! I can just imagine this being in the corner of a bustling market, where patrons could go and get a hot meal while shopping.

 

That’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! See you back here in a week, and be back tomorrow for my post on how I audit my content, then we will discuss at #ContentCircus tomorrow night at 7pm Central on Twitter!

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Podcasting for Business: How to Start a Podcast (and Keep it Going)

More people are listening to podcasts than ever: 40% of Americans have listened to a podcast—that’s more than 128 million people! Now that car audio systems can play podcasts and every iPhone comes with a “Podcasts” app already installed, consuming podcast content is easier than ever, and podcast listeners are a valuable audience. According to Edison Research, podcast listeners earn more money, are more educated, and are significantly more likely to engage with brands online than the average consumer. 48% of monthly podcast consumers follow brands on social media, as compared to just 31% of the general U.S. population.

So if you haven’t started a podcast as part of your marketing mix, what’s stopping you?

I’m about to tell you everything you need to start a podcast.

The right topic

At first blush, choosing a topic might seem easy, but it’s actually deceivingly simple. I recently covered choosing a topic in some detail on Mark Schaefer’s blog, but here’s the approach in a nutshell: choose a topic that’s both relevant to your audience and genuinely interesting to you. Your podcast topic also needs to align with your business goals, just like any other piece of content you produce. So don’t make it overly salesy by covering your products or services, but do choose something that relates to what you sell.

For example, if you sell outdoor gear, you might podcast about camping (how to camp safely in winter, camping for beginners, exotic locations that allow camping, etc.). People who go camping would potentially be interested in your outdoor gear, so this topic is well-aligned with your business.

The right format

There are all kinds of different podcast formats. You’ve likely listened to podcasts with different formats yourself. There are some podcasts that feature a single host discussing a topic (or several topics). Others feature two co-hosts. Many use an interview format (I use it for Marketing Smarts), in which one or more hosts interviews one or more guests. Some podcasts effectively feature a panel of guests and multiple hosts, but those can get unwieldy fast in terms of scheduling and editing.

When you’re just starting out with podcasting, be realistic about what you can handle. If you don’t want to host all alone, consider an interview format or find a reliable co-host who’s good on the air. Mack Collier’s been gracious enough to co-host several special holiday episodes of the MarketingProfs podcast with me, and he’s always a big hit!

You should also choose a consistent publishing schedule and stick to it. Knowing when to expect a new episode will make it easier for your audience to stay loyal.

How long each podcast is depends on how much time you have to devote to podcasting. If you’re strapped for time, consider a shorter podcast, say 10 or 15 minutes. If you want each show to fit within the average person’s commute, consider producing a show that lasts around 20 to 25 minutes. You could go longer, of course, since people can stop and start listening whenever they want, but I prefer to keep episodes to 30 minutes or less when possible.

Also decide whether you will edit the show or air the raw recording (with bumpers at the beginning and end, at least). Podcasts can be polished works of art or they can simply be you as the host discussing a topic for ten minutes. If you stumble over words now and then, it’s unlikely to greatly impact the experience for listeners, but if you strive for perfection, it’s (almost) attainable. Just make sure you include a budget and some time to outsource audio editing or else learn how to edit audio using whatever software you prefer (more on that in a second). I edit my own podcast episodes. Depending on how high your standards are, it can take a few minutes or several hours.

The most important thing is to be consistent, so if you experiment the first few episodes to find the right format, that’s okay, but make sure you tell the audience what to expect once you’ve hammered out your plan. One-man show or interview series, two co-hosts or a panel—anything can work, but your audience needs to know what to expect each time you hit publish.

The right plan

Podcasting is easier than most people think, but it goes much more smoothly if you do some advance planning. Chances are your business has an editorial calendar. If that’s the case, look at the calendar and try to choose topics for each podcast episode that fit within the broader content plan. To keep track of your podcast planning, you can use spreadsheets or experiment with tools like Trello for project management, ScheduleOnce for booking guests, and Google Drive for sharing your list of upcoming guests or show topics. If your company uses a more robust content management system that includes a content calendar, make sure to use it so that your colleagues can see what’s coming up.

The right equipment 

Many people think podcasting is difficult or complicated, or that it requires a lot of expensive equipment. None of that’s true! Nowadays, you can create and publish a podcast with just a smartphone or tablet. There are apps that can help you to turn your phone into a recording studio: Check out bossjock studio for iOS or Spreaker Studio for iOS or Android devices.

If you want a higher-end sound, you could use your computer, a microphone, and some noise-cancelling headphones.

The right software

Once you know what equipment you’ll use, it’s time to install some software so you can edit audio (if you want to). Free solutions like Audacity or Garageband (for Mac users) can be a good option if you’re not sure podcasting will work out for you. Once you know you’ll continue podcasting, you might buy a program like Camtasia for editing, or set up a plan to record using Zoom or Ringr if you’ll be recording interviews with off-site guests. You can also use Skype to conduct remote interviews, but make sure your recording software is set up to capture “system audio,” or you’ll hear just you talking with long pauses in between.

I use a Rode Podcaster microphone ($229), but I’ve also recorded excellent quality audio using a Samson Meteor mic, which costs around $70. Add some Sony PRO headphones and choose a quiet location and you could easily create studio-quality audio at your home or office.

The right hosting service

For podcasts, you’ll typically create an .mp3 file or an .mp4 if you’re doing a video podcast. You’ll need to host your .mp3 or .mp4 file on a podcast hosting service like Libsyn, blubrry, Spreaker, or PodBean. You’ll upload the file, then copy the link you’ll use to share your podcast on iTunes, in Stitcher, or on your website’s RSS feed.

The right promotional plan

No one will listen to your podcast if they don’t know about it. Work to drive awareness of your podcast, just as you’d work to promote an ebook, whitepaper, or webinar. Optimize your podcast’s landing page for search. You could also get podcasts transcribed, which is good for both SEO and accessibility. Many podcasters use a transcription service called Speechpad for this.

Remember to make your posts about the podcast visually appealing. Even if your podcast is audio only, you need an image to accompany the podcast post. You should have a logo for your podcast, as well as custom images for each episode (ideally) that include the URL. It’s easy to create images promoting specific podcast episodes using sites like Canva or PicMonkey, or even mobile apps like Over. Share these images on social media along with a trackable link to the podcast episode so you can see how much traffic each social network drives.

And remember to use your email list. Podcasts are helpful, valuable content! Be sure to share a link to the podcast in your email newsletter.

In no time at all, you’ll have your podcast up and running. If you’ve chosen the right topic and format, keeping up with it should be manageable—even enjoyable—for you. Podcasting about a topic you don’t care about is work and you’ll quickly burn out. Podcasting about a topic you’re interested in is fun, and you’ll find it much easier to hold to your production schedule.

Happy podcasting!

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone hosts the weekly Marketing Smarts podcast for MarketingProfs, named one of the top business podcasts on the internet by FastCompany. The show features 30-minute in-depth interviews with smart marketers from all walks of life. Geoffrey James, a contributing editor for Inc., listed Kerry as one of 8 Great Role Models for Wowing a Crowd (along with Steve Jobs, Tony Robbins, and Marsha Collier).

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For September

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 September:

Blog – At least 85,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 5,000 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For September

My blog’s traffic in September was 35,862 versus 36,154 in August, a decrease of less than 1%.  I got way behind on both the blog and podcast in September, only writing 3 posts in September.

I made a couple of changes last month to my blog that I think has at least improved my issue with falling search traffic.  The first is I went into my robots.txt file and made sure it including the path to my sitemap.  As soon as I made this update, I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that Google immediately started indexing an additional 200 pages from my site.  Also, I noticed a slight uptick in search traffic from that point forward.  Not huge, but definitely noticeable.  So much so that I believe search traffic will actually go up for October vs September.  So this might be something for you to explore, I had manually submitted my sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools before, and that didn’t seem to register, but adding the sitemap URL into my robots.txt file seemed to do the trick.

Here’s how traffic broke down by channels in September vs August:

Organic Search – Down 2%

Direct – Up 11.65%

Referral – Down 7.71%

Social – Down 14.93%

Other – Down 12.33%

Email – Down 81.43%

Referral, Social and Email being down is directly related to writing fewer posts in September, as I only wrote 3 posts for the month.  I got too caught up with client work and didn’t devote enough time to regular posting and it bit me.  Case in point, I published more posts this week than I did all of last month.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for September

The goal for September was at least 5,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show had 3,924 downloads in September. The drop was due to only having 1 new episode in September, and that didn’t publish until the last day of the month.  Given that, the number of downloads is actually pretty remarkable.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastDLJan-Sept

Strong growth throughout the year but it did start to tail off the last couple of weeks of September due to no new episodes going up.  On Wednesday I published the first episode of #FanDamnShow for this month and daily downloads had continued to fall this month up till that point.  A good reminder for me to make the time to create regular content for both my blog and podcast in order to build or even sustain an audience.

Here’s the blog audience and podcast download goals for October:

Blog Traffic – At least 90,000 visitors

Podcast Downloads – At least 6,500 downloads

This are the goals I set at the start of the year.  I’ll check back in next month and let you know how I did!

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For August

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 August:

Blog – At least 80,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 4,000 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For August

My blog traffic in August was 36,154 visitors versus 38,125 visitors in July.  That’s a decrease of 5.17%.  I had 10 new posts in August, which is about where I wanted to be with 2-3 new posts each week.

Here’s how each source of traffic did in August vs July:

Search – Down 5.8%

Direct – Up 13.42%

Referral – Down 17.9%

Social – Down 32.83%

Other – Up 7.75%

Email – Down 72.87%

Before I got into the numbers any deeper, I was interested to see if some of the decline could simply be a matter of people spending more time on vacation in August vs July.  So I decided to run the same numbers for August of 2014 vs July of 2014.  I saw that overall traffic actually increased in August over July of 2014 by 8%.  So it appears the decline is more likely a nagging side affect of the issue I’ve been facing for most of this year with search traffic going down.

I dove deeper into the search traffic for the entire year, and while the decline is steady with search traffic from Google, it’s less pronounced with Yahoo, and search traffic from Bing has more or less gone sideways, with June being the best month so far this year for traffic from Bing.  So it appears this is more a Google search issue than a search issue as a whole.  Then again since Google accounts for well over 90% of my search traffic, it kinda IS a search issue!

Earlier this month I went into Google Webmaster Tools and made a couple of tweaks to see if those would have any impact on search traffic.  I have noticed that so far this week, search traffic seems to be up slightly, but it’s really too soon to tell if the bump is likely coming from the changes I made.  I’ll keep an eye on it and if search traffic continues to increase, it will be a good sign that my tweaking worked, and I’ll talk more about what I did next month.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for August

The goal for August was at least 4,000 downloads of the podcast, and The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show actually had 5,330 downloads in August. This was up sharply from July and is the best month ever for the podcast.  Here’s the number of daily downloads so far this year:

PodcastDLsJan-Aug

 

As you can see, for the year the average daily download is right at 100.  A far cry from this time last year when there were only 128 downloads in the entire MONTH of August 2014!  I’m thrilled with the growth of the podcast but at the same time know it will hard to hit the monthly download goals for the rest of the year.

Speaking of which, here’s the blog audience and podcast download goals for September:

Blog Traffic – At least 85,000 visitors

Podcast Downloads – At least 5,000

This are the goals I set at the start of the year.  The blog’s goal will need a miracle to hit, but the 5,000 download number was hit in August so I just need to do that again in September to hit my goal for downloads.  I’ll check back in next month and let you know how I did!

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For July

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

First, here were my goals for July:

Blog – At least 75,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 3,000 downloads

Blog Traffic Results For July

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

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

Search traffic – Down 1.05%

Direct traffic – Down 5.13%

Referral – Up 6.71%

Social – Down 37.08%

Other – Up 36.87%

Email – Down 87.59%

 

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

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

BlogJuly

 

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

 

Podcast Numbers and Overview for July

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

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

 

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

Blog traffic – At least 80,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 4,000 downloads

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

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

 

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results for May

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

First, here were my goals for May:

Blog – At least 65,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,000 downloads

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

Search traffic – Down 3.61%

Direct traffic – Down 13.28%

Referral – Up 1.9%

Social – Down 41.67%

Other – Up 362.65%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Numbers and Overview for May

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

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

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

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

Blog traffic – At least 70,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 2,500 downloads

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

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

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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!