Happy new year to all who read my blog.

I’ve been blogging for just over a year so it’s a good time to think about the achievements and the goals for the coming year.

Benefits

1. I’ve received a steady and growing number of website visitors that I wouldn’t have got without the blog. This is due to a number of reasons including the long tail of search, referrals from sites where my content is syndicated such as webpronews, and referrals from other blogs I comment on.
2. Blogging has enabled easier participation in social media including other blogs, forums and sites like sphinn.
3. I’ve formed valuable relationships and contacts both online and also offline at events like the bloggers conference.
4. I believe I’ve increased my knowledge substantially more than I would have done otherwise because of the need to keep up to date, research topics and articulate points of view.

The hard things

1. Finding the time and making blogging a priority when there‘s a list of other urgent tasks to complete.
2. Breaking through the psychological barriers during the times when you feel unmotivated to post, run out of ideas or feel you have nothing valuable to add to the conversation.
3. Keeping an eye on the goals and not getting sidetracked.

This year

I’m committed to blogging and to doing more in this area. After a couple of months of light posting I’m ready to re-assess the direction of my blog and start contributing again both here and in other places. On that note, a group of Australian bloggers, notably Meg, Andrew and Snoskred have formed an Australian Bloggers Community. It has a forum which has got off to a great start and a group blog which will launch on 21 January. I’m pleased to be part of the community as a forum moderator and a contributor to the group blog when it starts. Hope to see you there!

This is worth a read, even on the weekend. It’s Lisa Barone’s live blogging of a webinar with Seth Godin.

To give a taste of what it includes, here are some notes I made but you really need to go and read the whole thing.

• Consumers are starting to expect a lot more direct communication with organisations. The Internet has created channels for this communication and organisations that don’t use these channels will lose customers.
• It’s no longer possible for a company to control their message. Blogging and other avenues have changed the landscape. Now a company better have an authentic story because they won’t be able to hide anything.
• Too few organisations are really embracing the long tail.
• Marketers are obsessed with “how many”. They need to shift their thinking and start focusing on “who” instead.
• The effectiveness of Internet advertsing (ppc) can be measured unlike buying TV ads. That frightens a lot of traditionalists in big companies.
• No-one is forced to read your blog! Blogs need to be a magnet not a microphone.

I’ve been following the commentary on Podcamp Perth, mostly because my friend Ross went and it always looked like it would be a good event. Next year maybe.

Darren Rowse does a good job of maximising the value of an opportunity. He was interviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age about the page rank drops. He’ll get quite a lot of people clicking through to his site so he addresses them specifically with a welcome post. It’s a good way to capitalise on an expected source of new visitors and do as much as possible to keep their attention and convert them into regular visitors.

Blogs are great for flexible, speedy responses to events.

My Google Analytics stats show that 70% of visitors spend less than 10 seconds on my site and 66% of visitors visit one page only. When I first looked at these metrics I was really concerned that I was doing a terrible job at engaging my visitors. I came up with a list of actions such as linking to related posts, improving the categories, encouraging comments etc . I’m absolutely certain that there’s a lot of room for improvement and that action plan is still valid. However, I do have a much better insight into the metrics after reading Avinash Kaushik’s fantastic book on web analytics.

Time On Site

When someone first visits a website, a session is started and the time is logged. From that point, every time a request is made to the web server, there is a timestamp. The time spent on a page is calculated as the difference between the timestamp when the visitor goes to the page and the timestamp when they visit another page. All well and good except that there is no way of knowing how long the person spends on the last page they visit as there is no time stamp to indicate the end of that event and the beginning of the next. The tools calculate the time spent as zero.

This makes the metric particularly misleading when the website is a blog. Although I might like people to go deeper, read other posts and have a look around, it’s perfectly understandable that someone visits and just reads the latest post. The problem with the stats is that whether they spend 10 minutes reading the post or 5 seconds deciding it’s not interesting, the time on site is still zero which then distorts the overall “average time on site” metric.

Page Views

The number of pages viewed is usually considered to be important when trying to measure the level of engagement. The more pages someone looks at, the more interested they are in the website as a whole. It’s not quite so straightforward with blogs. Subscribers and repeat visitors are a good measure of engagement and yet these visitors will typically come just to read the latest post, or the last few posts which will probably be on one page. And then of course they might not visit the site at all and read the posts somewhere else like a reader.

So what should you measure?

Well I guess the metrics are still useful as long as you understand the inherent flaws. And subscriber stats and number of comments are useful indicators of engagement. Anyone want to offer some feedback on what metrics they find useful and the best way to measure engagement on blogs in particular?

The Australian Blogging Conference was excellent and well worth attending. A few people have already blogged about some of the sessions and no doubt there’ll be more posts over the next few days. Peter Black, did a great job organising the conference and has said that he will do a round up of the coverage on the conference blog so that’s going to be a good resource to get notes from individual sessions.

So, I thought I’d just cover the business blogging session as it was one that I particularly enjoyed and also one of the most relevant to this blog.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Boyd has started a blog about blogging in Australia and interviewed me.

The first Australian Blogging Conference is being held at the QUT in Brisbane on 28 September.

I’ll be there and looking forward to meeting fellow bloggers.

The format is facilitated discussion rather than speakers and presentations which sounds good.

Click on the image to get the details.

Meg has opened up a discussion on the growing trend for bloggers in Australia to receive pitches from companies seeking to form relations with bloggers and use their blogs as a vehicle for product promotion.

Co-incidentally the same weekend there was a heated debate on the issues of payments and disclosure as they apply to bloggers. The story centres around a Microsoft ad that features quotes from several prominent bloggers. The quotes all answer the question “when did you know your business was people ready?” with “people ready” being a phrase promoted by Microsoft to describe their business philosophy. The bloggers received payment for providing the quotes and their ethics in doing so were questioned by valleywag. There were mixed reactions with some agreeing with valleywag that it somehow crossed a boundary and broke readers trust in the bloggers. Others claimed it was a storm in a teacup, it was clearly an ad and should have been apparent that the bloggers received payment.

So, why does it matter?

There is a perception that bloggers provide a personal, unbiased opinion and, in the eyes of their readers, this makes them more trustworthy and credible than mainstream media and corporate websites. It’s not surprising that companies seek to capitalise on this trust.

It can be a fine line for bloggers to walk particularly for those who run ads on their blog or who provide paid reviews. It makes sense (and is covered by the law in some countries) to disclose when payment is received for a blog post. The reader can then take this additional information into consideration and in fact it might not make any difference if enough credibility and trust has been established. There are quite a number of grey areas though, for example posts that are not paid reviews but that mention a company advertising on the blog or with whom there is a business relationship. There are also other motivations for writing something which might not be apparent to a reader and which nevertheless provides some tangible benefit. Link baiting can fall into this category.

It’s good that these issues are being discussed and I expect that more bloggers will publicise disclosure policies. My opinion is that it should and will be self regulating. Individual bloggers can decide where they stand in terms of incentives for blogging and how and when they should disclose payment. The audience will in turn make up their own minds on the trustworthiness and credibility of the blogger. I’m in the camp of believing honesty and transparency is the best policy and I think it’s the best business decision as well as the fairest. I would be stupid to assume that this is the case with every blog I read though.

20 to 25% of search queries that Google gets in any one day are unique. The queries have never been seen before. This statistic was given at the recent Google searchology event.

I spent some time analysing the searches that resulted in a visit to my website during the previous month. Here are some of the stats:

• 42% of queries were unique
• 85% of queries were made up of 3 words or more
• The longest search query was 17 words!

The figures aren’t surprising. Having a blog means that I rank well for a large number of longtail searches on the subject of adWords, pay per click or Google. Search queries are getting longer and queries with 3 words or more are much more common now than they were previously.

Some observations:

Keyword analysis is a good way to uncover hot topics and common questions or concerns

For example, quite a few people came to my blog because they searched, in different ways, on the topic of adWords being expensive. It’s interesting to know this and I can take action by writing more on the topic or addressing it in a frequently asked questions section.

Of course I had to have written something on the topic in order to rank for the combination of “adWords” and “expensive” in the first place. There are obviously a range of other popular topics that I haven’t written about and therefore the search phrases don’t appear in my log files. However, blogging is a great way of producing a variety and volume of content to get visibility for those long tail phrases in the first place.

Did people get the information they wanted with the long tail searches?

People phrase things awkwardly, or use odd combinations of words, in an attempt to get information on something they don’t know a great deal about, particularly when the topic is complex. I tried out quite a few of the searches trying to assess the experience from the perspective of the searcher. Sometimes I thought there was a good chance they got relevant information. Sometimes the content probably didn’t cover what they wanted to know and just happened to contain the same words as the query but in a different context. That’s going to happen and the searcher may just leave immediately to try again. Maybe they weren’t part of my target audience anyway. However, it really made me have another look at overall usability and reminded me how important it is to have clear navigation and help people find what they want.

Details are good but focus on the overall trends

I love the detail in analytics and could happily spend hours pondering some puzzling aspect of the data. There are always a few puzzling things as well. One of the keywords someone used was the single word “Australia”. I’ve no idea how someone arrived at my website from that because of course I don’t rank anywhere for the word Australia (I checked :-). The details are interesting and can offer insights. However, overall trends and some key pieces of information are what is important.

On that note, I’ll finish with a link. I just ordered Avinash Kaushik’s book on web analytics.