blog measurement Archives - Page 3 of 4 by Mark Murnahan

Blogging Community: Perhaps You Are More (or Less) Attached Than You Think

Blogging is Better With Community Thinking

Most of us will probably agree that collective thinking as a community is more beneficial than our individual thoughts. This does not mean we will all adapt to the thoughts of our community. Sometimes we will disagree, which can also prove beneficial. The fact remains that communities think bigger than the sum of their parts. This is why we have terms like “two heads are better than one” and why social media has become so useful for cultivating ideas with collaboration, for those who choose to embrace it. My blog thought for today is about the communities which we create, and how much of the community involvement is easy to overlook.

Blogging creates small communities which are often loosely connected, and it does so in some unique ways. Some of these small communities which blogs create are closely connected and some are only loosely connected but yet just as valuable. Often times, the community effect is simply the sharing of an idea which seeds thinking for others. It creates a collective intelligence which guides us on our way.

The ideas I write here on my blog must have received influence from somewhere. I could not have written about SEO and social media marketing 20 years ago. Sure, I largely write from my experiences, but it is influenced by a community of others. Sometimes the influence is a thought that I saw expressed in a blog or combination of blogs, then I nurture the thoughts and add my experience. Thus, it still reflects the community thinking I mentioned. When I can define sources of my inspiration, I try to link to those blogs so they will know that I am a part of their community. I also try to add my thoughts to the respective blogs’ comments and hope that it benefits the community.

Your Community Extends Beyond Your Blog

Many bloggers are too critical with their perception of community, simply because they do not recognize ways to measure it. One of the greatest gifts a blogger can have is a huge stream of comments on their blog articles. Blog comments are just one notch below the prize of a link referencing their work in another blog article. However, this is not always the most important measurement of their community reach.

Sure, I am one of those who wonder “why didn’t people add their two cents” in the comments, or why they will use my work without crediting me, but then I look at the other measures and I can relax again. Yes, the comments bring the sense of community into one place where it can all be sorted out and discussed, but let’s take a look at other ways you can know you made an impact.

If your blog is syndicated through RSS (basic examples of syndication: Squidoo; GoodReads; BlogCatalog), it likely reaches a lot of other places where it is discussed. When I click “Publish”, I know that my blog is automatically published to a lot of other networks, so I try to be mindful of this. I try to keep an eye on what people are saying “over there”, too. There are a lot of blogging tools to help you measure this, and you will find some of the in the article titled “6 Essential Blogging Tools for Bloggers and Non-Bloggers“.

I think of a blog as the hub of social media for a business. It really is the center point, but it is not always the actual website where the blog resides that receives the discussion, or gives and receives all the benefits. It is the information of the blog … the message, which is the hub, and not only the website.

Important Community Tip: Look outside of just your blog.

I can reliably measure that over 80 percent of my blog’s engagement comes from outside of aWebGuy.com. That is a sizable statistic to overlook, and it makes up a massive portion of my community. Just imagine how easy it would be to miss this critical part of the community I work so hard to build.

Syndication can spread a message far and wide, but it also carries a responsibility to know how the information was received and how it may adjust your thinking on a given topic. This could mean Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, other blogs quoting your work, and many other possibilities. Discovering these places and finding out what people had to say can be very useful. Plus, if you seek them out and communicate with the respondents, it gives pretty compelling evidence that you care what people have to say.

If you count on Trackbacks to find all of the places your blog content is being discussed, you will surely miss a lot. Taking extra care to follow the flow of your work can be quite enlightening.

As a person who writes blogs, I do not have any delusion of being a critical piece of a community outside of my own blog. I try to be valuable to the larger community, but I am just a cog in the machine. This big machine will run with my participation, or without it, but I remain here to keep fine tuning it in my own little ways. I add my little piece of “community” with my thoughts and I find that it often benefits me, and hopefully those around me, too.

Thoughts for My Blog Community

I want to leave you with some thoughts to consider about your blog community, whether you are an author, or reader.

When you think of your community, what does it mean to you?
There are a lot of organized blogging communities, but what about the extended community which influences your blog or is influenced by it?
How are you building that community?
Are you overlooking your expanded community?
Which blogs provide influence to you (links welcome)?

Sometimes the value of blogging is simply found in the collective thinking accumulated from multiple sources and experiences compiled by the author. This does not always require direct two-way communication. All the same, it is often greatly enhanced by participation.

These questions I have posed are not just rhetorical questions to help you think about your blogging efforts. If you have an answer, please share it with the community.

Related Articles:

Photo credit to mitosettembremusica via Flickr.

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Is Your Blog Sending Mixed Messages?

Have you been here before? I do not just mean here at my blog, but have you been faced with questions or doubts about your efforts? Maybe you question whether people understand the intent and purpose of your blog, or maybe you question the intent and purpose of the blogs you read. These are legitimate considerations for a lot of bloggers, whether producers or readers.

I am a big proponent of blogging. In fact, if you just google “reasons to blog”, you can see that I am practically a poster child for the benefits of blogging. If you need encouragement, I suggest giving my list of “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” a thorough read. If you need blogging tools, I would recommend “6 Essential Blogging Tools for Bloggers and Non-Bloggers“.

Let’s face it, great blogging is hard work. I have actually considered making a video of my steps to produce a blog article, but then I want to break my own fingers just to avoid the temptation of all the video editing on top of the other efforts.

What does it take to produce a blog article? Here is a one-sentence rundown for you: I get a bright idea, then I research, write, print, proofread, edit, print, give it to an editor, edit again, find a graphic, edit the graphic, categorize it, tag it, keyword it, write a description, produce an excerpt, record a podcast, upload podcast, title and tag the podcast, review the podcast, preview the article, edit it, preview it again, publish it, tweet it, facebook it, linkedin it, stumble it, reddit it, ping it, diigo it, mixx it, delicious it, then watch my web stats and keep my fingers crossed while hoping that some people will digg it, stumble it, facebook it, tweet it, and etecetera.

Somewhere in blogging, there must be an earthly reward. This is not the extent of what it takes to produce and promote a good article, by any means, but I was running out of breath trying to fit it into just one huge run-on sentence. There is a whole lot more to it than just that one breath. Through all of this effort, I hope that readers will appreciate it just a fraction of how sincerely I was trying to benefit them. If I benefit them enough with useful topics, they may help pass my blog along to somebody interested and in need of my marketing services, so that I can keep blogging without my kids getting too skinny.

Ahh, true passion of the SEO and social media marketing blog producer … you want some of that, don’t you?

Fun and Simplicity of Blogging

I already pointed out that I am an advocate of blogging. It it true that blogging holds many great rewards, but blogging is not an easy task for most of us. Some people will promote how fun and simple it is to produce a blog, but then I once heard a woman say something similar about having a baby, too. Yes, blogging can be very worthwhile, but there is also a pregnancy and labor side of blogging. Good blogs come from things like pixie dust and unicorns, but great blogs come from mind-numbing levels of creative effort. This is especially true if they are business blogs, which require a high level of marketing talent.

Knowing that it requires a lot of work to produce a useful blog, it would be a horrible shame to create and promote all that great work and not at least receive a few comments from readers, more subscribers, additional business, or something to justify all the effort and keep you wanting to continue giving your works to this amazing Internet resource we all build together.

Why Do I Make So Much Effort to Blog

Yes, here comes the reason I work hard to serve you. I will break it down really simple to tell you why I work hard to provide benefit to my readers. It is not as despicable as you may have thought.

If you are a subscriber to my blog, you have seen my crafty works to help get your thoughts racing about SEO and social media marketing. You may wonder why I work so hard to help people with marketing tips and ideas. I do not sell advertising here on my blog, so how can this possibly be worthwhile to me? I do not even promote my own company. Actually, the opposite is true, and my company promotes my blog.

What the following description of my efforts should drive home for you is the very most essential piece of the combined art and science of online marketing. Here it is: The most important thing about my blog is to serve people with something useful and compelling. The short version that I often tell people is “be useful!”

Yes, there you have it. The emphasis of my effort is to be useful and compelling. The kicker is this: When I am useful and compelling, people will share my work with others. If they share it on their blogs and social networks, my search engine ranking is improved, my readership is improved, and far beyond any big ego boost you may suspect, I actually stand a greater chance of having a paying customer ask me to help to do the same for them. Now that does not sound so much like the kitten-killer you may have made me out to be, does it? I did not even con you into buying something you do not need. That is refreshing in this day and age, don’t you think?

Have I Helped You?

I want to ask that in consideration for my efforts for you to pass along my work. If you are a do-it-yourself’er, please pass this along to people who may hire out my marketing services. If you are a marketing person and you do not have a conflict of interest, please spread this to others in our field. If you are a marketer seeking a client, just like me, I want to ask you to reach out to me so we can share ideas. Maybe I can guest blog for you and help promote you to your best audience.

In any case, if you find it useful, I want to ask you to subscribe to my blog and share your comments with others here. Also, please do not be too ashamed to pass along what I offer to others on your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, or other social networks. I am not your embarrassing Cousin Eddie. Helping me to share my work with people who can benefit is nothing to be ashamed of. I may be just “a web guy” to you, but I may provide a lot of benefit to somebody you know.

I promise that, although I am from Kansas, I will not behave like the famous Cousin Eddie from Kansas depicted in this video.

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New vs. Returning Users: How Readership Churn Counts in The Static Age

The Internet has changed. Wait, scratch that … the world has changed, and the people of the world are fully engrossed in “The Information Age”. Maybe it is even beyond that, and perhaps we can now effectively call this “The Static Age” because of the massive level of static we must sort through to hear or be heard. Right now, today, there are likely 42 squillion people writing about your industry on a daily basis, and unless you are the reincarnation of Elvis Presley, you will have a hard time capturing their interest.

It is time to take a closer look at an important metric of your website traffic. Who is coming to visit, and will they return? Did you do something that knocked their socks off? Did you have something to say that totally blew them away enough to subscribe and come back? Allow me to explain why this matters, and what you can do about it.

Good Bloggers Know and Care About Readership Churn

The number of bloggers in 2010 has shot the moon. If you don’t believe me, that is fine. I should not need to prove this with numbers, because you surely already know it. You probably already saw another blog (or three) in the last 1 minute and 22 seconds. The blast of information is fast, furious, and growing like a flu pandemic. Some of it is great information, but most of it will interest you as much as a knitting class interests a race car driver.

Much of the massive blast of information simply does not apply to your life. Even if it is reliably useful information, I think we can agree that a lot of what we see on the Internet is filed away in the “time wasted” category and we will not be going back to read more.

So what about you? Will you find yourself filed away in the bottom of your readers’ Internet history? If you want to avoid this, you must get a couple things straight right now. In my short list, I will include that you must be useful, pay attention to your readers, give them a great reason to come back, and do not disappoint them when and if they do.

There is Still Hope for Bloggers!

I have written about good reasons to blog. The reasons I have listed have been implemented and trusted by many readers. I write things to help people, and I do not take them for granted. Even with all my efforts to be useful, it would be astonishingly simple for people to forget where they got that useful idea (whatever the idea). I know this, because I forgot where I have found some great ideas, too. I am telling you … there is a massive wave of information, and even the best of us cannot keep it all filed away perfectly. So it is extremely important to help people remember you. If you are in business, it is important to help people remember why to come back to you when they want more, or they know somebody who does. How can you do that?

If you are blogging to advertise your goods or services, you will have a hard time getting people to pay attention. Something far more important is to give them something they care about. Give them something useful. Since you cannot do something amazing every day (nobody can), you should give them a picture of other things you write about. Give them an archive. If they think that you may be just a little bit interesting, let them see if there is more where that came from. I will blog about how to create various kinds of blog archives soon, but for now, just be aware of the idea and that it can help others see more value in what you provide.

If They Want More, Make it Easy and Non-Threatening

The next thing to do is be sure that if people see a value in what you provide that they can subscribe to receive more of it. You do not have to beat them over the head with it, but you cannot expect them to go out of their way to give you their attention, either. It is not a promise that you will be amazing. It is not a promise that they will ever do business with you, either. It simply means that they will have more opportunity to see what you are about, and if they eventually need what you offer or know somebody who does, they will remember you. Timing is a big issue in business, and most of the time, people do not need or want what you sell at the moment they discover you. Things can change, and if they are at least aware of you, you will have a lot stronger chance of getting the call when they need you.

Give them an easy way to subscribe. Google’s FeedBurner is easy and non-threatening because people will never need to worry about you spamming them. If they subscribe by email, it is safe because they are not giving it to you. I never worry about subscribing to a FeedBurner feed, because I know my email is not going anywhere but Google, and Google already has my email. They don’t spam me. As for RSS subscribers, like email, they choose whether to subscribe and they will not need to worry about you having their email address, and the only way you can really “spam” them is by putting it on your blog for the world to see.

It is this easy to ask somebody to subscribe. Allow me to lead by example.

Please Subscribe by Email or RSS

or Subscribe in a reader.

… and it is this easy to show them your past performance so they know what to expect:

See My Blog Archive

To summarize this, it is important to remember the value of repetition in marketing, and that if you want people to receive your message over and over again, you need to do something useful that benefits them. You have to give them a great reason to receive your repetition. Then, you must let them know that you want to be in their list of considerations when it is the right time for them.

No, this is not a precise tutorial on how to get things just right. It is a message on how to think about your marketplace and why people will want to hear from you again. Just like any business endeavor, when you reach the same people again and again, it is a whole lot easier than trying to continually find new people. This is true whether you are giving something away for free, or offering something for sale.

Now I ask that if you have an interest in what I said here that you subscribe to receive more, because I truly do not want to have to replace you.

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Benefits of Blogging You May Have Overlooked

I took a short break from my blog over the past week. I was very busy with other projects, and it gave me some time to consider why I blog and the benefits I receive from it. While I was away, I thought about some less obvious ways it helps me in my business. Some obvious benefits to a blog are easy to list, in fact, here are 10 really good reasons to blog. I want to share a couple additional benefits I consider to be extremely important, and perhaps you can relate to these as well. If you have a blog, I want you to think about those ways it benefits you and how you can further harness those benefits. If you do not have a blog or you are not blogging enough, I want to give you positive encouragement and help you recognize reasons you should.

Blogging as a Thought Portfolio

I want more business, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. In my case, I do not just want more business … I want better business. Blogging helps me to achieve this, because it allows my potential clients to have a better understanding of my work as a marketing guy. It allows people to know a whole lot about what I do and how I do it, before they even pick up the phone and call me. It provides excellent proof that I really know what I am doing with SEO, social media, and other Internet marketing topics. Here is my blog archive. It is like a window to my mind as it relates to my work. The people who spend a lot of time here before they call me are always better clients, because they already know we will make a good fit. That means better business, and not just more business.

Think about how blogging could benefit you in this way. Regardless of your industry, being useful to others and showing what you know and how you think can be very attractive to potential customers … the best customers.

Blogging as a Sales Tool

I am not the salesman type. I give great factual data and I let people make decisions based on real information. I like for people to make their own decisions. People who cannot see the benefits of my marketing services without my having to poke and prod them with a big sales pitch do not make good clients for me. If a business relationship begins with a salesperson pushing to convince somebody to buy, you can bet there will be a lot of hassle down the road.

I realized a long time ago that chatting somebody’s ear off to sell them something they are unsure of is about the last thing I could ever hope to do for a living. I think I would rather be a professional house mover, and with this body, I don’t see that happening.

Even when people email me or call me, I can often either reference something I already produced on my blog or give them an article to read about the given topic. Having so many of my thoughts and ideas laid out on my blog and indexed nicely by Google makes an invaluable tool when I need to answer a question for somebody. Just having written the information also makes it easier for me to have words to answer the question.

Give it some thought about how your blog or other website may be an excellent sales tool beyond just those nameless and faceless people on the Internet. You may find a blog to be extremely useful, because it already says all the things you want to say, and can prevent a lot of wasted breath. In my case, I find that if somebody is not willing to do some recommended reading about what I offer, they are probably not too serious about doing business with me anyway.

Other Blogging Benefits and Tools

Blogging holds extremely high value when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and it is at the core of good social media marketing. If you feel that you just don’t have the time for it, by all means, hire it out. If you feel that blogging is not important or does not have a benefit in store for you, reading the following articles will surely convince you otherwise. I am confident that there is information in these past articles on my blog that will provide value to you and help your business pursuits. Take a moment and find out for yourself.

10 Really Good Reasons to Blog
If you think blogging is just for geeks or those with extra time on their hands, think again! If you ever wondered if you should be blogging, or why to continue blogging, this list will give you very strong reasons.
Produce More Website Content … But Why? SEO?
More website content means more things for people to find in a Google search, but it goes a bit deeper than just that.
Blogging Improves Intelligence and Here is Proof!
Blogging can increase your business intelligence, expand your creativity, provide you with a better perspective on the intelligence around you, and more. Much relies on how you use it, and I am here to help you get smarter, so stop scanning and start reading!
Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better
This article shows a statistical analysis of how blogging provides more value than any single social media effort alone.
6 Essential Blogging Tools for Non-Bloggers and Bloggers
Even if you are just a casual reader, I want to give you some really useful pieces of information to help you receive more benefit from blogs and to make the information more manageable. These will not take a lot of time to implement, and it will be worth the time you spend.

Blogging Dilemma: Truncated Blog Excerpts or Full Blog Articles?

Excerpts or Full Articles: A Grizzly Question

Blogging and SEO (being found in search engines) go hand in hand. If you have read more than a couple of my articles, you know that I am a strong proponent of blogging. Blogging is a huge asset to anybody wanting to be more visible to the public, and so it should not be taken lightly. If you do not have a blog, be sure to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog“.

Blogging comes with a lot of choices, and those choices include whether to truncate your blog posts and show excerpts on the home page, or to include full articles. Let us consider these options.

Truncated Blog Excerpts vs. Full Articles

As you may notice, I have opted to truncate the blog articles on my home page. Until this weekend, my blog has always included full length articles on my home page, archives, tags, and categories, but I decided to try something different. I will tell you a couple of pros and cons to the decision. I will talk a bit geek for some people here, but I will circle back around to something human that everybody can clearly grasp.

How Do You Like Your Blog? (My Blog Too!)

When I looked at the option of using blog excerpts on the home page, I thought of readers first. Perhaps you have had to make this judgment call as well. Sure, I see what other bloggers do, but I seldom do things just because somebody else does it. Well, except for smoking … the cool kids smoked so I fell into that trap. When it comes to writing a blog, I like to believe I can do something original. Please tell me you didn’t already read this somewhere else. There simply is not a solid rule for this, because bloggers have different styles … millions of different styles.

I tried to be deliberate in my decision making. I tried to think of everything, and I crossed my fingers hoping it will not explode in my face on Monday when you see this, or in the future, after my decision kicks in with more readers. I considered website performance issues such as page load times, average article length, length to truncate the excerpts, search engine indexing, and others. I will be happy to share my thoughts on these matters and l how I addressed them if you ask me.

From a reader standpoint, I know that you do not want to wait around for a page to load. Nobody wants to wait … even for me. Crazy thinking, I know. I considered how it may affect existing search engine rankings, because my home page ranks very well for anything I write. I considered a long list of other technology issues, but I mostly considered you, the reader.

How do you want my blog to work? After all, I am writing this for you as much as for me. I do not just write this to be stagnant and without public attention. Without readers and potential clients who actually take action on my blog, I will have a pretty hard time explaining to my wife why our kids are eating so much cake instead of other kid food (my wife is a totally amazing cake decorator, by the way). Cake does not make a great diet in the long run … believe me, I tried. I like eating grilled animals, and she does not make that kind of cakes. I have to buy my animals the hard way, so I need to find readers with action running through their veins and ready to push the marketing go button. That means I have to reach about 30 squillion of you before one reader takes their business to the next level with my services. I cannot do that alone, and I cannot do it with a mediocre blog … and neither can you. So I had to take this pretty seriously.

Blog Excerpt Pros and Cons

Something I knew going into this is that by truncating my blog posts and using short excerpts on the home page instead of full articles, I would be increasing the number of blog posts showing right upfront. This means people can scan through things easier to find what they want to read, and then click on it if it looks interesting to them. A couple of thoughts on this were that it should look interesting, and even quicker than before. I would have to try and set the hook with new readers sooner than ever with just a short excerpt. People don’t like to click around to find what they want to read … they want it right now. The three click rule is written in the laws of Internet statistics (I should add that to my 11 Important Internet Marketing Laws article). We “Web Geeks” know the rule of three clicks, and we know that readers will go *poof* like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight if we ask for a fourth click. I also had to consider that a massive number of people enter through pages other than my home page. I had to know where they enter, and why. I had to analyze their usage and consider the user bounce rate of the home page in relation to other pages, and a whole lot of other great geek almighty blogging factors. I really needed to feel secure about this decision, but I do not want to feel too secure, because it is not my decision as much as it is your decision. If you do not like it, I need to have a quick fist-full of clicks to bring it back to blogging as usual. Even if you do not tell me with comments (which I hope you will), you will still tell me by your usage patterns. Make no mistake … the masses will win this decision, and mine is only one little vote in that decision.

Using excerpts also means more database work to load all the articles, tags, categories, and images. Since I generally try to include just one or two images per post. Using full articles, including one image per post was fine, and I could still load full articles pretty quickly. Increasing the number of posts on my home page means increasing the number of images on the home page, because I wanted each article to be represented with a thumbnail and I would be adding more articles. More images normally means slower pages. At the same time, I had to weigh in the consideration that most of my blog posts are very long. Yes, I have no idea when to shut up most of the time. So maybe I could balance that out, since the text of a typical Murnahan blog post is about long enough to make up for a huge image download.

Another consideration in favor of truncated excerpts in place of full blog articles is reducing possibilities of duplicate content. It is a big problem for a lot of blogs, because the same full article content is on the home page, each individual article, archive pages, tag pages, category pages, and etcetera. I have always done things to help reduce duplicate content issues (search engines don’t like duplicate content) like using a meta “noindex, follow” tag in my archives, blog tags, and category pages. That helps, but I also really wanted to focus on individual articles, so along with implementing excerpts, I reworked my XML sitemap to boost the indexing priority of individual posts and reduce the priority of categories, tags, and archives, which already had “noindex,follow” meta tags in the headers.

Blog Usability Comes First

What I know above all else is that you, the reader is what matters more than anything. I know that if I write information that people can use … the things that they really like, and that other people cannot or did not produce as well as I did … that is what matters. How much does it matter to me, and to blogging in general? It is what makes the big difference in why most SEO fail at link building. Great … no, fantastic website content is what matters more than even the blog structure. If you have great usable content on your side, you can kill grizzly bears with a toothpick and a rubber band.

Grizzly Bear SEO and Pink Ponies for Sale

Just as I was writing this, I was alerted to a very fresh article about grizzly bear SEO writing. The article linked back to a piece that I wrote titled “SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies for Sale“. What?! Yes, this is what makes my SEO world spin, and I do know when people link to my work. It is usefulness and marketing talent that matters more than website structure, alone. Blog structure matters a whole lot for SEO, so do not get me wrong, but the bottom line is usefulness. That means useful in every way, and sometimes that means testing and pushing the envelope.

If you get all the pieces just right, and you give people something useful and interesting, the rest of the SEO factors fall into place divinely. To see what I mean, just brave the wild Internet enough to go and see the grizzly bear article I mentioned, along with my response to the grizzly bear poo and pink ponies offered out there in the SEO marketplace.

Now I ask for your input. What do you think? Do you like the new truncated blog excerpts or full blog articles? Answer me with your comments, or answer me with your actions. Either way, I am paying close attention and I do care. After all, my kids can only eat so much cake!