Day 17 – Don't check your blog analytics during the holidays
Seriously, it’s way too depressing. I’ve been checking my analytics almost daily for a while now. Typically I see my traffic go up, then down, then up a little more, then down a little, and so on and so-forth, but the last few days have been absolutely dismal.-
I knew when I first decided to pull a 30-day blog-o-thon that Thanksgiving would fall right in the middle of it and possibly affect my numbers, and that’s definitely been the case. Here’s my advise to an every-day blogger. Think about what you’re posting and post your best work on days that you know you’ll get more traffic. This site typically sees the most traffic between Tuesday and Thursday and the least amount of traffic on Saturday and Sunday.
Day 16 – Authenticity
In the social media community, we often talk about authenticity in your online exchanges. I’m a bit of an idealist. I prefer authenticity in every aspect of life, though I don’t necessarily demand it (it’s a free country after all). One thing that really kills me as a musician, however, is when famous singers lip-sync to their popular hits in public appearances.
Such was the case at this year’s (probably every year’s) Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Is it too much to ask for these people to sing their freakin song!!??? Don’t these musicians have any respect for themselves? I realize it’s a long parade, but they could have at least sang during their televised appearance.
My advise is to be authentic. No one is going to care about your contribution to anything if you’re not doing it for real.
Day 15 – Websites are software, blogs are for content
This is becoming more and more true and it’s only going to become more widespread in the next few years. The ‘informational website’ is going to go away and give rise to websites that are a lot more like software applicationsand a lot less like press releases and informational packets. Asp.net, php, ajax, and javascript will replace html web pages. In this new age of complicated scripts and high-tech interfaces, people will come to your website to DO things instead of merely gather information. They’ll get your information from your blog.
In the next few years business blogging will become ever more important. In fact it will be critical. There will simply be no way for anyone to find your business or organization without a blog that is updated relatively frequently. Now is a golden opportunity to get ahead of the curve. Right now it’s possible to jump on the bandwagon and enjoy a few years of success before your competition tunes in and eliminates your monopoly of the market.
So, what do you do with your website? Be creative. What services can you make available to your customers? How can you make buying from you easier? Do you do ecommerce? Should your customers be able to view their account online? These are questions that even the most technically backward companies are going to have to acknowledge in the coming years.
The fact is that the only things that are valuable on the Internet are content and services. Content tells people what they need to know and services let people ‘do stuff’ to make their lives easier or more fun or whatever. My recommendation is to provide both, and to do it now and not in five years when you’ve already missed the boat.
Day 14 – Happy holidays to one and all!!!
The downside of having a 30-day blog-o-thon is having to post even if it’s a national holiday. I decided to take it easy on myself and just share a link. CSS-tricks is one of my favorite new blogs that I’ve discovered recently. It’s a little more technical than a lot of the blogs that I typically read, and therefore it gives me a lot of information that I’m sure will be useful.
This week they’ve dedicated each post to wordpress specific tips and tricks. Yesterday’s post was about what to do after you first install wordpress (plugins, settings, etc). I attempted to install the auto-update plugin, but I couldn’t get it to work. The XML site map plugin, however, installed perfectly and seems to be working great. All in all it was a very informative post from a great blog.
I sincerely hope everyone has a very happy Thanksgiving, enjoys their turkey, and doesn’t overeat too much (I always do). It’s one of my favorite days of the year.
Day 13 – What's best for Google?
Okay, it’s the day before thanksgiving and I’ve decided to pick on Google a little bit. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Google despite the fact that a lot of people are currently calling it ‘The Wal-Mart of the Internet‘. I’ll save that discussion for another day, because on this Thanksgiving eve, I’d like to examine how difficult it must be to have to write the parameters that decide which results you get when you do a Google search.
So what is Google’s main prerogative? Well firstly, they want to make sure you use THEIR search engine, so providing relevant search results is high on the list. If people start using another search engine, they’re not clicking on the paid ads on Google, Google goes under, and the end of the free world as we know it will very soon be upon us.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Google needs people to click on the paid ads in order to stay in business. I make it a point to never click on the paid ads unless I plan on buying something. I know some people don’t know the difference between paid and unpaid search results, so they click indiscriminately. My point is that the folks at Google are smart (really smart) and they’ve adjusted their algorithms so that blogs are favored for the organic search results so that if someone is primed and ready to buy, they will click on a paid ad. It’s really brilliant if you think about it.
On a side-note, I’d like to thank the folks at Google for all the great services that I use and enjoy every day (Google reader, Google analytics, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps, Google Chrome, and hopefully soon Android). They’re a truly unique and amazing company that continues to adapt their business model and stay ahead of the curve, as well as keep us all on our toes. I hope everyone has a happy holiday, and your comments are always welcome.
Day 12 – Social Media ROI
There has been a LOT of debate in the social media community when it comes to clearly identifying the ROI in social media. While it’s clear that there IS an ROI in social media, it seems nearly impossible for the community to agree on the exact indicators. I thought I’d dedicate this post to examining a few different viewpoints proposed by some of my favorite bloggers.
Chris Baggot of Compendium Blogware
The assignment was to take all the keyword traffic generated through a blogging program and assign a cost per click based on dividing the total number of clicks by the total monthly cost of the blogs. Then simply compare that keyword traffic to what it would cost in Pay Per Click and calculate the difference.
In the case above the total monthly blog cost was $2,500 for about 100 Compended blogs. That same traffic through PPC would have cost almost $42,000! This is a great example of the clear&tangible value of widespread corporate blogs. I’ve never seen this exercise do worse than a 5x blog benefit.
A great way to measure the ROI in anything is to compare the cost with an established strategy and therefore prove that the new strategy accomplishes the same thing at a reduced cost. Chris is also known for arguing that the ROI in social media must be calculated through direct conversions (sales). This is obviously a good strategy as well, but it only works partially, due to the fact that there are other benefits to social media marketing besides dollars generated.
Kyle LacyI have always been a believer in social media to help grow your business. You can use it as a delivery tool to send a message to many users in a short time span and build relationships. The problem with the business environment and social media is the mindset many business owners are under… the “i need my return now” mindset. “I’m investing $2000 a month in marketing.” I need to see return every month.
Chris Brogan of New Marketing Labs
Marketing is about reaching a number. Send 41,000 brochures and we’ll get 41 sales. Reach millions of views, and you’re successful like Fred.
These two quotes more adequately define what I perceive to be the true ROI value in social media, though Mr. Baggot’s views factor in as well.
When I look at social media I see hard and soft conversion points. The hard conversion points are the direct sales that result from your online marketing efforts. The ROI in this is instantly measurable and perfectly defined. It’s the soft conversion points that give us a little more trouble, though I believe they can be defined easily through a more basic comparison. These soft conversion points include email addresses you obtain from your blog comments, friends on social networks, and anyone else who volunteers their contact info or who you can connect with within the social media community.
Look at direct mail, or even email marketing. A lot of what determines the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of these older marketing strategies is the list. Building these lists can cost thousands of dollars in research and a lot of time. What is social media great at doing? BUILDING LISTS! This is the key to defining the soft conversion points in social media. It is the newest, sexiest and easiest way to build large lists of people who you can then broadcast your message to. Sometimes the easiest way to define something new is to compare it to something that’s already been proven, and I think this model works. What do you think?
Day 11 – indy awesome goes mobile
I’m extremely excited to announce that the indy awesome is now optimized for viewing on the iPhone, Blackberry, and other smart-phone platforms. I just got back from a meeting at the ProBlogService headquarters where we discussed the importance of making blogs available on mobile platforms. I discovered that there are a few simple plugins that make the whole process really easy and foolproof.
The first is mobilepress and it’s available via the Official Wordpress Plugin Directory. This plugin creates a great user-friendly interface for your blog when it’s viewed on most smart-phone platforms. I also installed iWPhone by content robot, which optimizes your blog performance on the iPhone. The install is pretty simple if you’ve ever installed wordpress plugins in the past.
I hope that these additions will make it a little easier for my readers to keep updated on all things indy awesome. Stay tuned for day 12 of the blog-o-thon where I’ll examine some of the ways you can measure ROI in social media.
Day 10 – Finally in double digits
All right, we’re a third of the way through the indy awesome blog-o-thon, and I’m still going strong. I’ll admit that there were days when I might have been unmotivated or busy or whatever, but so far everything has gotten posted on time. I wanted to take at least one post to evaluate everything I’ve learned so far from this experience.
1 – It can be tough sometimes to figure out what the hell to write about.
2- It can be really tough to find time some days, especially if you’ve made a commitment to blog every day.
3- Blogging every day is great for your blog traffic!
4- Forcing yourself to think up a new blog topic every day is a great way to expand your horizons
5- Blogging is still fun, especially if you do it a lot.
Thanks to everyone who’s followed the blog-o-thon so far. Keep reading. There’s much more to come.
Day 9 – Blog-o-thon fuels analytics
When I began this blog-o-thon I thought that it would be a good way to attract some site traffic to my blog, but the actual results have been pretty amazing. I’ve had friends, family, and complete strangers check out my work over the last week, and I than you all for your continued support. In addition, my site traffic is way up.
The great thing about this growth is that the vast majority of it (60% or so) is attributed directly to social media. When I look through my analytics report, I find that sites such as facebook, twitter, friendfeed, and smaller indiana attribute to the vast majority of my site traffic. I get a few random hits from search engines and of course a few people who just type the URL directly in, but all-in-all social media has had very good results.
This just goes to show that no matter how ambiguous the direct ROI numbers for social media may be, it is still a fantastic way to draw traffic to your site. It’s also great to have a gimmick (like a blog-o-thon). If anyone has any great web gimmicks to share, please feel free to comment.
day 8 – URL Rewriting for Wordpress – It's important
A while back my buddy John Kohlmeyer from Marketpath wrote an entry in his blog about a great feature he incorporated into their new eCommerce module called URL rewriting. Basically what he’s talking about is setting your content management system so that when you add a new page (or blog entry) it uses human language in the URL. So if you sell widgets and you want to write a post about ‘new amazing widgets’ then the URL for the post would look like this ‘http://-your url -.com/amazing-new-widgets’ instead of this ‘http://-your url-.com/92&&^*jnhd/php/aspx.html.&&930′ or however it’s dynamically generated.
It’s fairly easy to make wordpress do this for you. I figured it out with a little help from wordpress expert Tom Deeter. First you click on the ’settings’ tab on the top right of the wordpress dashboard. Select ‘permalinks’ from the settings menu. There are a couple of default settings, but Tom showed me a custom script that works great. Just select ‘custom’ and insert the following…
/%postname%
Click save and you’re done! URL rewriting is important for two reasons. 1) It’s easier to read and understand if you’re visiting the site and you care about that sort of thing. Basically it provides a little bit of structure and organization to help visitors navigate your site. 2) Two is much more important than one. It will definitely help your search results if you have keywords in your URL. Keywords located in the URL are probably the most important of any on your site, so the more you have the better off you are.
Stay tuned for Day 9 of the blog-o-thon. Lots more great stuff coming up.
Hi, I'm Colin Clark, President of TribeSwell. We specialize in helping small businesses utilize online technologies to drastically expand their business. From social media consulting to search engine marketing, we have the skills and knowledge to take your business to the next level. read more 
