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.