I am relating this to blogs, but it can apply to many other things in life, and in business. In fact, the more I think of it, this really isn’t just about blogs at all. I hope that you can relate to this, and begin to uncover more of your bright ideas.
Do you ever have a great idea that you just have to share with the world … or at least the people who read your blog? I do, and I find myself jotting down a note about it. I am old school, so I end up with a squillion pages of notes stacked on my desk. Some of them make it to my handy dandy little notebook, and a decent number even make it to my list of draft copies here on my blog.
It is great to have a list of ideas for future articles to present to the world … or at least the people who read my blog. So, in those moments of inspiration, it is best to take some notes and remember to get back to it later. After all, it is often hard to be astonishingly brilliant on cue, and who wants to publish something that is less than “astonishingly brilliant”? Not this guy, but I still do it anyway.
Here comes the challenging part. Getting back on task with a particular topic can feel just a bit like hopping on a little pink bicycle to run to the grocery store … in your bath robe! Sure, maybe it is something different for you, but to me, it feels awkward. It is a huge challenge to resume astonishing brilliance after the initial spark fades away.
It is sometimes easy to wonder “Was that idea really all that great?” But you know, I sometimes question the same things while looking back at my blog archive. What I realized is that those sparks of inspiration add up to become the whole blog over time. The things we share in blogs, and in other areas of life and business cannot all be brilliant … Not for you, not for me, or anybody else!
This was inspired by the long list of blog article drafts stacking up in my list, but I think it can be applied to any other sort of great ideas that stack up on us. I still opt for quality over quantity, because volume of ideas is not impressive in itself. However, everybody has a different view of what is a “worthy idea”.
If you share more of your ideas, something amazing could happen. Somebody could be inspired or otherwise benefit just from the little bits of non-astonishing brilliance that you left in a pile on the corner of your desk. We are not all quite the same, and some of the stuff that you relegate to the “less-than-awesome” stack could just be worth “publishing” after all.
So then the challenge is to stop letting those semi-brilliant notes sitting in the draft phase from collecting dust. It makes me wonder how many brilliant ideas you have that are lying around collecting dust and getting shuffled out of your busy schedule?
Do you ever feel the same challenge, or is it just me?
People ask me about blogging every day. They often ask me by way of a search engine, but they also ask me by telephone, in person, and a lot of other communications methods (no carrier pigeons, please).
I have written a lot of blog articles, and I have written a lot about blogging. As an example, I offer you my “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog“, along with the many others you will find in my blog archive. I have also written about reasons blogs fail.
A blog is a great hub for search engine optimization and social media marketing efforts. This is a fact which is undeniable and proven with a lot of data. A blog can also require a lot of time. Time is money, and somebody must be held accountable.
When I consider the various blogs (websites) where I write, it is as if each one of them represents different aspects of my persona. Some of them bring out my perfectionist side (the prominent side), and I am compelled to read them over and over to be sure they are perfect before publishing. Other blogs (websites) are more fun and I can whip out my wacky sense of humor.
In any blogging effort, I find that the more time and effort I invest, the more valuable it becomes to me. In the case of my blog at awebguy.com, I have invested a lot of time and effort to have all the pieces fit. It serves me commensurate with my effort.
I normally include a creative image to represent each article. The pictures in a blog post have a surprising affect with readers. They enhance the message and set a tone. I suggest always using a creative image in a blog post! I am skipping the image this time.
I also spend a lot of time adding page descriptions, blog tags, blog categories, and even recording a podcast for many of my articles so that people can listen instead of reading. Of course, these things require a lot of work.
When I finish all the production, then I need to share my articles across my social networks. Sure, a lot of this can be reasonably automated, but a human approach is always better. In fact, the effort is quantifiable and I am going against my own style to produce and publish this article.
Changing Blog Formats
The point here is that I am changing formats. I will still provide my lengthy articles making strong points using things I know. In fact, I have some great pieces coming up soon, so if you have not subscribed, I would like to encourage that you subscribe now. I will also be including some short and simplified clips in the mix … like this one. This particular article is intended to be a quickie, and I will actually save a ton of effort which some people will notice.
As I contemplate changing formats to a less time consuming style of blog, I feel compelled to offer the advice given by many parents as follows: “Do as I say, and not as I do.”
I want to offer you this cautionary consideration. Many people think they can get by doing less than what it takes to produce a great blog, but then still expect great results. It does not work! I have paid a lot of dues in the realm of blogging, and I can assure you that this article will garner far less attention than the ones I spend a lot of time and effort to produce and publicize. For me, that is fine, because I am actually not here to sell you anything. If you want to sell something, you really should do all of that extra work that may seem useless to you.
I will likely provide much more of the “bare bones Murnahan” in the future. This time, I just wanted to say something useful and fast. OK, maybe it did not seem fast to you, but I nixed the podcast, image, and a ton of the other work that has helped to make this blog popular. I also hope that you still find it useful, and preferably before you choose to cut corners.
Look Mom … no frills! If you intend to skip the extra work in producing your blog, just be sure that you do not rely on it to bring in more business.
The bottom line is that if you want a blog to boost your bottom line, you should go the extra mile.
Have you ever noticed that when you visit a blog, you generally only look through the most recent articles? It is pretty common that upon visiting a blog’s home page, people will just scan through a few items and see if there is something they want to read. In the blogging world, it is often assumed that newer is better, but this is quite often not the case. It is just more visible.
I am guilty of looking at the date something was published. I am not sure why in some cases, but I guess I am just so accustomed to seeing a date on blog articles. I suppose it is just one more way that people can feel that they are getting the latest and greatest news. A reality check for bloggers and readers alike can come in the form of these two little questions:
For Blog Readers: What about all of the great information that is not just recent or new?
For Blog Authors: What about the people who are not there for the news, but who just want great information?
I have noticed many blogs removing their publish date from articles, and it actually makes sense for some blogs. If the information is still useful, does it really matter whether it was written this week, this month, or even this year? A lot of great information is timeless. As I ponder this, I am reminded of an article I wrote about eight or nine years ago on the topic of H1 tags titled “H1 Tags Improve Search Engine Placement”. Thousands of people per month read that article. It is the top ranked article in search engines on the topic, and has been since the day I published it. Does the date really matter? H1 tags (web page headings) are still as important today as they were then. The information is still useful.
Some Blogs Are “Evergreen”
When I say “evergreen”, I mean that the information is as useful a year from now as it is today. Blogs have widely varying degrees of “evergreen” content, but most business blogs will have a good level of content that is still relevant and useful for a long time. It would be pretty hard for most businesses to have a blog that was no better than a used newspaper.
For blog authors, it can sometimes feel like a huge shame that people are actually missing some of your greatest pieces of work. So what do you do? Do you try to make everything more genius than the last? That is a good idea, but it is probably not always going to work. In my case, I know darn well that some days I am just a whole lot less brilliant than I would like. I often write blog articles on those days, too.
Scanning through the first few items listed on the home page of your blog is often how new readers will decide whether to come back, subscribe to your blog, or schedule an afternoon of reading through page after page of your past articles. This makes it pretty important to have something right up front to impress them, but how? You cannot just leave your best work parked on the front page of your blog forever. Your regular readers would get sick of seeing it. Do you just stop blogging until you can come up with something to beat the last piece? That is probably not the best answer. In fact, that is a pretty terrible answer.
You could republish some of your best work, but the same problem of repetition arises when you consider your long-time readers. Plus for many blogs where the date is part of the URL, there is the tragedy of changing the URL where all of those great incoming links are pointing. Sure, a 301 permanent redirect to the article’s new location is easy, but you still lose some of the link value for those older works.
Of course, you could just count on excellent search engine ranking for everything on your blog, and use Google as your website navigation. That way, if they are looking for it they will find you anyway. I have often counted on this, but then again, search engine optimization is my job. What about the people already on your blog who may find some of your past articles to be really useful? Larger websites often have a user-friendly sitemap to help people find useful information. The equivalent for a blog is the archive. Website search tools are excellent, but some people want to browse, and you should make it easy for them.
What about all of those readers discovering your blog from an older article? Will they even notice your most recent brilliance? What can you do to grab their attention to your latest and greatest stuff? Maybe a better solution is to create more evergreen content and to revive your archive.
Revive Your Archive!
Scanning the home page of a blog makes sense if you are a regular reader who has participated in the blog for a while, or if the blog is mostly about recent news. Let’s face it, though, many blogs are full of “evergreen” content that is not just seasonal or only applies to right now. If this is the case with your blog, it is a good idea to promote some of your past articles for those who may have missed them. The trouble is that you don’t want to annoy your current readers by saying the same old thing over and over. So how do you deal with keeping things current and fresh, while also being sure that people can see that you have been brilliant long before they happened upon your blog?
You can tell where this is going, right? Sure, I want you to go back and browse my blog archive. There are some excellent tips there, and a lot of information that I am confident can help you. I also want to be sure that you are thinking of this with your blog, so I am not just being selfish.
Make Your Blog Archive Easy to Navigate!
I have noticed that it is easy to assume that I have not missed much on some of the blogs I regularly keep up with. However, I still sometimes like to go back through the archives of my favorite blogs. Sometimes this can be a hassle, and sometimes it is a breeze. Now consider the people reading your blog, do you want it to be a hassle for them, or a breeze?
There are a lot of types of archives, but many of them require a lot of clicking back through a chronological month-by-month archive structure or going to the end of the page and clicking on a link for previous articles. Some will have archives nicely paginated so you can flip through them quickly. Other blogs seem to make it a challenge to read what they have had to say in the past.
A lot of blogs have killed their tag clouds, and do not even show their tags on posts. I still love them, and appreciate bloggers who make a tag cloud available, or at least tags on individual posts. For example, go click on a tag for this article (listed at the bottom, such as blogging) and see how easy it is to find more related information. Some blogs do not even list the blog categories for articles. Call me old fashioned, but I still love tags and categories. I can use them to find other things with similar information. I think I love them even more because I know from my website statistics logs that they are used extensively by readers on my blog.
I hope that you will consider your archived blog content and how you may keep it easily accessible. Making it easy for people to find and for them to browse could add up to a lot more subscribers over time. You may notice that on my blog, I have my archive linked at the very top of every page, just below the recent articles listed on the left, and at the bottom of every article along with links to my most recent articles. Isn’t redundancy awesome?
Twitter is a great place to gather useful information. It can also be a good place to find an audience of people who care about what you have to say. Twitter makes it easy to create a lot of business and personal connections. If you use Twitter with a little foresight, it can become an extremely valuable resource. If I did not believe this, I never would have spent the time and effort to write aĀ book about Twitter, but blogging is even better. I am using Twitter as an example here, but much of this can be applied to other social media resources as well. What I wish to show is that many tools may be used for effective social media communications, and at the hub is a blog.
Many Twitter users have a blog, or even more precisely many bloggers have a Twitter account (or several). Blogs still outnumber Twitter users by hundreds of millions after all. Although Twitter can be useful, particularly in conjunction with a blog, it is not a silver bullet. I will explain this with data that I collected between March 2009 and March 2010, and provide charts to include comparisons as follows:
Twitter update (tweet) frequency and website traffic
Twitter followers and website traffic
Blog frequency and website traffic
Blogging is Better than Twitter, but Twitter is Still Useful
This is not a criticism of Twitter. I like Twitter, and I find a lot of great uses for the service. I meet a lot of wonderful people, I have interesting conversations, I learn from Twitter, and I share information with people using Twitter. However, it seems that while millions of business people have been fascinated by Twitter and a handful of other social media sites, it can be easy for them to overlook the even greater value of creating excellent website content, and doing it often. Social media can bring many people to a website, but consistent and high quality content development is key to keeping them coming back and keeping them telling their friends. This is extremely valuable to most business efforts.
In order to emphasize the importance of content creation (blogging), I will illustrate the side by side growth and reach of a Twitter account and a blog which were both created near the same time. The first blog post was on 7 December 2008 and my @murnahan Twitter account was created on 9 January 2009, so about a month apart. I used Twitter in conjunction with several other sites prior to this (copmagnet.com, stormmagnet.com, and others) but my @murnahan Twitter account and this blog create a good comparison. This is a one author blog and a one author Twitter account of about the same age.
Twitter Update (tweet) Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison
Many people believe that if they tweet at high velocity all day and night that it will bring huge traffic to their website. There has been some validity to this, but the landscape has changed. It should be obvious that influence is more important than simply yelling across a room and the same is true with Twitter. Here is a chart showing numbers of Twitter updates (tweets) compared with blog visits. I will add additional metrics later, but this may be an eye-opener to some people. Since lines on a tiny chart will not do this justice, I am providing the number of actual Twitter updates I sent during this period, below the chart. The high levels of traffic in the earlier part of the chart coincide loosely with a huge numbers of tweets, but then toward the more recent months you can see that traffic went back up (after I finished writing three books in 2009) while there were many thousands fewer tweets per month. Look at March 2009 with 9091 tweets compared to March 2010 with 175 tweets month-to-date.
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
9091
5969
1272
659
671
850
314
406
329
400
355
238
175
Twitter Followers and Website Traffic Comparison
A lot of Twitter followers should surely do the trick, right? It seems that there has been some amazing wool pulled over Twitter users’ eyes with this myth about Twitter followers. Sure, it is great to make a lot of connections, but how does that play into actual relevant website traffic? After all, website traffic is a common reason that a lot of people use Twitter. A squillion followers is a big dream for many people, but the way Twitter follower numbers relate to website traffic is not the same as some people may imagine. There is a lot more to building a brand and building website traffic than sending a bunch of tweets to a large number of followers.
I must say that in the beginning, Twitter was massively helpful in introducing people to this blog. In those days, people were retweet crazy, and it seemed that people retweeted everything I wrote. An example is an article I wrote about Twitter retweets … it was retweeted over 400 times. It was probably actually retweeted a lot more, but that is just what tweetmeme has on record.
Twitter helped to spread the word and create a lot of incoming links from many other social media sites as well. In May 2009, I wrote about how Twitter improves blog traffic (NOTE: “improves” and not just “increases”). In social media time, that was a long time ago. Twitter still holds great value that should not be overlooked or underutilized, but Twitter is different now.
Blog Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison
Twitter gets them there, but frequent content creation keeps them coming back.
Twitter can be instrumental in generating and cultivating an audience for a particular blog topic or service offering. A chart that cannot be overlooked is the one below which shows the direct relation of blog content creation and site visits. I used actual numbers of visits to my blog, so I multiplied the blog post numbers in order to be more visible in the chart. What I wanted to point out is how the lines follow a very similar course. While comparing nearly every metric of my website traffic, the one thing that relates more closely than any other is to continually create useful information for my readers. I hope that you will see this as an important focus in your efforts, too.
A blog is a hub for good social media outreach and is what keeps the machine moving. It is where you can reach more people with the information you want to share the most. All of the many related tools in your social media marketing strategy are fantastic and should be used to the best of your abilities. In the end, the tool that is expected to create more sales for your business is your website, so take good care of it and pay attention to the numbers.
If you have not already read the following articles, I encourage you to take time for these.
aWebGuy.com Grade 99.7
Blog authors love comments so much that they may lose focus of other important measures of the value of their work. If you are a blogger stuck in the destructive thought pattern that your blog is less important or less heard without comments, read on my friend. I have some good news for you.
I want to address the concern that a lot of bloggers have and carry with them like a big monkey on their back. The monkey I refer to isĀ blog comments or a lack thereof, and it is time to look at some additional metrics. Of course, blog comments can have huge benefits such as bringing together other points of view and growing a sense of community, so don’t get me wrong. What I have to tell you, though, may ease some of that pressure and give you some encouragement.
I kind of like the way Seth Godin stated it in his massively read, respected, andĀ circulated blog. In a blog post titled “Why I Don’t Have Comments“, Seth Godin said “… it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.”
Blogging is Concentrated Social Media
Blogging is social media at perhaps the most focused and personal level. A blog post provides the opportunity for discussion of a narrowly focused topic, and it is personalized by the originating author who often wants to hear from readers. The great news is that sometimes fewer but more meaningful comments can be a really good thing. This blog is focused on social media and SEO, so I do not expect a lot of input from bean farmers and rock and roll bands. They may come here to read and gather new ideas, but they are far less likely to add commentary than a know it all SEO or social media practitioner. This can be a good thing, because I have a lot of readers who do not know it all, but want to.
In any case, many blog owners are frantic about the curse of non-commenting readers. It gets them all stirred up and concerned that nobody is paying attention, that they have lost their readers’ interest, or that their blog has a lower perceived value. Buck up my friends, and consider another point of view.
Is There Something Wrong With My Blog?
One of the first things you may imagine when comments are sparse is that something is wrong with your comment system. So you check it by responding to a post. No, that is not it … commenting is working fine. So it must be that the quality is suffering, right? No, that is not it … you have written some of your best work. Has something else changed? Here are a couple questions I asked myself recently when considering the topic. I have included my conclusions as well. Perhaps these are also useful considerations for your blogging efforts.
Is it your reader-base? No. I still have thousands of the same regular readers as before. The server logs and statistics reporting from FeedBurner,Ā Google Analytics, and Clicky do not lie. These are the same people who left hundreds of comments on previous posts.
Are your articles actually being read? Yes. The average time on page is way up, and the bounce rate is way down, meaning that readers spend more time on each article and also visit more pages of my blog.
Is your writing quality or public interest of chosen topics suffering? No. My statistics logs show that they receive more attention than ever. Although some recent posts are longer than usual, readers’ time on page is up … way up.
Have you asked for readers to add their opinions, and are you really asking questions in your material? Yes. I always ask a question for readers to address with their opinion and to start a dialogue. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know this to be true. I practically reach out and smack you silly to hear your comments.
Are your readers disengaged? No, but this was actually my biggest concern. I receive many comments on my work at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, and by telephone … actually more than ever. So people are engaged and reading, but just not commenting where everybody else can benefit. This brings up an important consideration of how people are using the Internet.
Have people changed and their usage patterns changed? Yes! Ding ding ding … we have a winner! This is true here at aWebGuy.com and I have found it to be true in many other blogs as well.
Blog Comments Are Down While Readership is Up
It can seem strange that although blog readership is up that commenting could be down. How could it be that more people are spending more time on a blog, yet fewer of them are taking the interest or care to add their comments? It is a sign of the times? Yes, Internet users are behaving differently, and that is fine. The results are different for everybody, and it requires a closer look at some other important measurements.
Important Measurements of Blog Quality
Instead of beating yourself up (the way I sometimes do), consider these other metrics of the success in your blog’s reach and impact.
1.) Are people still linking to your blog in social bookmarking sites, from other blogs, and other social media venues? For this, you may want to see my recent article titled “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building” to clarify the matter of linking. I pretty well kick some butt in link-building, so you may want to settle in and read this one.
2.) Are your readers still spending the same or more time on each article? A look at your statistics will tell you the answer to this question.
3.) Are people still responding in other social media or other desired calls to action including offline methods of response?
4.) Are you still producing content that has a clear and obvious public appeal by meeting a need of your readers?
If you answered yes to these questions, the answer is likely that you are simply so damn correct in your materials that others feel no means to criticize your work, no perceived means to accentuate your work, and the conclusion may just be that no comment sometimes means you’re right!
I am sure you are just dying to comment on this, but if you got this far and have nothing whatsoever to say, it just means I am right and I have given you something of value. You’re welcome to it, and I thank you for reading!
You have given me the means to accumulate a whole lot of nice little badges like the one below showing what is what on this Internet. I thank each of my bean farmer, rock and roll band, and SEO/social media know-it-all friends for being a part of this blog. Even if you are a bit coy from time to time.
