The Blog Medic

In this series of short entries entitled “One Action a Day”, every exercise is designed to help corporate bloggers gain insight into the readership or inspire for future posts by looking at your site statistics. Best of all, it should only take a few minutes of your day, so you can get on with the many other projects you’re responsible for!

In the last entry, I suggested looking at the top keywords your readers use to discover your site. Today, we’ll look at your referral traffic.

Referrers are the fellow bloggers or website owners who link to you. If you’re using Google Analytics, look at Referring Sites, under the Traffic Sources tab, and expand the list beyond the default top 10. How many of these do you recognise? Are there some unknown or new sources?

Click through to their site and educate yourself on what the site is about, who runs it and in what light your site was mentioned. If it was mentioned in a positive or neutral light, why not leave a comment thanking the author for the unexpected link or drop them an email? On the other hand, if the post stinks, take your time and be level-headed in your answer. Remember that if you can solve this person’s problem, you may find yourself with a new brand evangelist.

Make it a regular activity to look at your referring sites, and build relationships with their owners. Not only are these inbound links valuable in terms of SEO, but you’ll be growing your network and building a livelier community around your business.

Read all “One Action a Day” tips.

With the responsibilities of a company blogger often stretching beyond purely writing a daily entry, time can be a bit short. In depth analysis and personal education, two habits essential to quality writing, get neglected.

In this series of short entries entitled “One Action a Day”, every exercise will help you gain insight into the readership or inspire you for future posts by looking at your site statistics. Best of all, it should only take a few minutes of your day.

What are the top 10 search terms people use to get to your site? Have a look at the keywords list, found under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics. Now, look past those obvious 10 and look at the lesser-used terms. Do any of the terms surprise you?

We often get in a rut and use the same jargon every day, so what new words could you use to describe your business well? There’s nothing wrong with using the thesaurus or asking colleagues how they present the company to friends. Think of broader terms as well as industry-specific ones.

This will give you hints as to what themes to cover in your entries, widen the net of the search terms you rank highly for and make your writing more interesting and colourful!

Read all past “One Action a Day” tips.

In this series, I’ll be writing about the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

You’ll find the full series here.

The best way to make your role as company blogger as productive and fruitful as possible is to have the support of your colleagues and management. Getting everyone internally on your side should make it easier to go ahead with wild and wonderful ideas, since they’ll be confident that you can be trusted and are measuring results of every new idea you put in place.

While we may be creative softies, those sitting across the table are likely to think in measurable terms and KPIs where every decision is backed by hard numbers, so it’s worth learning to speak their language.

In a future post, we’ll look at how to communicate the more subjective qualitative information you’ll encounter but first, let’s focus on the hard stuff.

These hard stats are easy numbers to acquire so once you’ve picked your analytics package (Lee Odden lists 20 tools for blogs, some of which are better than others - I recommend Google Analytics to get you started), these are the first numbers I suggest reporting to your team on a weekly or at least monthly basis.

1. Unique visitors: How many people in total have visited your site during a given period? Note the difference between “visits” and “visitors” as a single visitor can come back for multiple visits. Count each visitor once for a better gauge of your readership.
2. Loyalty: How often do readers come back in that period?
3. Top content: Which articles, categories or tags have had the most readers?
4. Referring sources: How many inbound links? What kind of traffic do they bring in?
5. Keyword analysis: What keywords are leading users to your site? Are they relevant?
6. Geography: If your product is limited geographically, are your readers in regions where they can act on their interest? Can they buy, order or visit it?

Note that if you can, find out the IP addresses used by your office and add them to the exclusion list in your analytics package. This will give you a more accurate figure of the “real” traffic to the blog, since it’ll filter out the many hits you create when pottering around maintaining the site.

In addition to these basic figures, I would suggest reporting the number of subscribers to your RSS feed if you’re using a service like Feedburner to manage your feeds, as well as Technorati score and authority ranking, on which you should register/claim your blog.

Next, we’ll look at reporting softer measures like opinion shift, discovering your evangelists and forecasting traffic, but this should get you started.

Whether it’s your own business endeavour or you’re writing for a corporate blog, you’ll want to track who’s talking about you and what they’re saying. Traditionally, PR agencies would put together daily all the press cuttings for a company and send them through.

When the boss said “let’s launch a blog”, he might not have allocated the budget to do this large-scale tracking, but will expect you to circulate some metrics and reports on the buzz you’re creating. Thankfully, the Internet is full of useful and free resources.

Find the buzz

What are people saying? What low-effort, automated ways are there to track the buzz? Keeping in mind the limited amount of time you’ll want to dedicate to analysis (you want to spend your time writing, don’t you?), there are great ways to automate or simplify the research.

• Google Alerts: Setup Google Alerts with your company name, your competitors’ names and some industry keywords. You’ll get reporting from news, blogs, videos and pretty much everything Google indexes. Get it as an email or RSS feed* on a daily basis.
• Twitter tracking: If your users are likely to be active on Twitter, you might want to track a few keywords relating to your brand.
• Yahoo Answers: Do a first search for your company name (For example, Priceline) and click the orange RSS icon in the address bar to start tracking it. This feed will bring up any mention of your search term - it may also pick up some irrelevant flotsam along the way if your brand name is something too common.
• Google Analytics: I think you should be using Google Analytics for a number of reasons (which I’ll reserve for a later post, alongside a review of multiple other free stats packages), but amongst them lies a priceless tool - Referring sources. Find out who is linking to you and how much traffic they’re sending you. It’s often a good way to quantify how much visibility the author of the praising or criticising article gets.
• Del.icio.us bookmarking: Visit Del.icio.us and search for related keywords. Look at which posts have been most bookmarked by readers, it may hint at what kind of content they find most useful.

[* Not clear on what an RSS feed is? No shame in asking! Back in Skinny Jeans has one of my favourite simple explanations of all times.]

Share the buzz

Now that you’ve found out what’s going on, there are ways to share the information (aside from the dreaded weekly spreadsheet) which your colleagues may find refreshing.

• Del.icio.us (yes, again!): Create an account and aggregate your findings by bookmarking their URLs (The Firefox toolbar plugin makes it so easy) and sharing either all the bookmarks, or simply those tagged with a specific word. For example, if I worked for Campaign Monitor, I could share http://del.icio.us/thatcanadiangirl/campaignmonitor with the team, having tagged all relevant news with “campaignmonitor”. [Bonus points: Integrate the feed to your blog as Twitter have done on theirs to share the buzz with your readers.]
• Google Reader: If your colleagues are somewhat technically inclined, they may be using RSS readers already. If that’s the case, exploit the “Shared items” feeds in Google Reader to instantly distribute useful links. Danny Sullivan has a great explanation of Google’s “Shared items” feature and how to use it.
• Twitterfeed: Want to communicate your findings with your Twitter followers as well? Plug the RSS feed of your choice into Twitter with Twitterfeed. A word of warning, be sure to balance it out with non-automated genuine conversation or you’ll annoy your readership.
• Internal wiki: I’m personally not a big fan of wikis because they take active attention to remain up to date, but if multiple people are likely to report on links they found, it can be a good solution, enabling anyone in the team to modify a given page where all useful links are saved. Wikimedia is an example of a self-hosted wiki you could use.
• Google Docs: I hear you say “enough with the Google love already!” but just one more. Google Documents, provided your colleagues also have a Google account, also allows multiple users to update and edit the same document, whether it’s a text file, spreadsheet or slide presentation.

All of the above are free tools, which should help when you’re working on a tiny or non-existing budget but need to quantify and qualify the buzz to support your reporting to your boss and your colleagues.