Blogging

Just a word of advice: You really, really do not want to go anywhere near stuff like this snake oil seller when you launch a new blog. Trust me on this, there’ll be tears before bedtime…

I just had an interesting question posed to me via the private msg system here at Performancing. This particular reader wanted to know how to use a blog to drive traffic to her ecommerce sites. It’s a good question, because it allows for so much scope in it’s answer.

The question was this:

How about a post about strategies to drive traffic to a site through a blog? I have been thinking about adding a blog to a site for a while. I’m wondering, how can I get traffic to the site without google’s help and could I use a blog for that purpose?

Firstly, there just isn’t any easy fix. Blogs are hard work, period.

Saying that, sure you can use a blog to generate traffic to another site, or use a blog to create traffic on an existing site. It’s a fairly simple concept, but it rather depends on your niche as to how hard a task it may be.

If your site sells products on a theme, then it’s relatively easy unless you’re selling something utterly dull. There are a number of ways you might attack the challenge:

• Post news on yours and your competitors product lines. By creating an industry/niche specific news site you could generate a lot of links from a lot of different sources. Mostly other blogs of course, particularly if you make it known that you welcome having your headlines syndicated.
• Create a HOWTO blog. Post tips, anecdotes, stories about your products. Use search services like Technorati tags and pubsub subscriptions to find other product users stories, and link to them, help them if you can. Again, by creating a hub of product information the links should flow, within your niche.
• Create a group user blog, and allow product users to submit their own stories, and help build a core group of customer evangelists within your niche. Let your users spread the word!

Those are straight off the top of my head. Im having similar thoughts as to what to do with a friends site right now. It’s a simple, nice little ecom site where you can buy her products, but it could be a center for industry discussion, product discussion or a large community of product users (rather like a forum, but in a more bloglike format).

The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination vs resources (time/money/people) you have to throw at it.

Not all blog topics are created equal. Likewise, different blogs will do better with different types of content. If you’re in it to make money, it’s worth taking a look at what type of content will earn your particular blog the most money–the Dao of Your Blog Content.

There are a million different aspects of content, and they vary across industries. But here are 3 of the most common tradeoffs I face:

• Quality vs Quantity of Posting
• Being creative vs. paraphrasing existing knowledge (easier)
• Original ideas vs. ‘reposting’ (easier)

At my own blog network we’ve fought with these issues, and decided to prioritize accordingly:

• Quantity over quality (not that we ignore quality — but get up archives at all costs!)
• Paraphrasing existing knowledge over being creative (after all, it’s much harder to be creative if you’re defining what a fixed-rate mortgage is)
• Reposting over original ideas (it’s much faster–efficient–gets a lot of news out there for readers and helps us with search engines too)

This isn’t to say our methodology will work for everyone–it won’t. If you’re looking for your blog to land you consulting gigs, rather than just get you search engine referrals, you may want to learn towards quality over quantity, for instance. But if monetization through ads is your primary goal, you may go for quantity. With Adsense or Chitika, ‘transparent visitors’ (those from search engines) will usually be easier to monetize.

The point is, though, you should plan your content. Over the course of a year or two you will be writing a lot of it, so make sure it will achieve your business goals. Find your Dao.

When starting a blog it is helpful to have a goal, some clear idea of why you are writing. Once launched you need to have some way of measuring your success towards that goal. I want to talk to you about some ways to think about tracking your success, because at the end of the day, it’s all about RBI, Return on Blogging Investment

Your blog needs a goal. Is it to make you famous, make you a fortune, get you consulting gigs? The metrics you use to measure progress towards the goal will help you focus on what is helping you toward this goal.

Popularity

Perhaps the easiest way to measure your success is to look at metrics that tell you how popular your blog is. Popularity in the blogosphere is usually represented by links coming to your blog and traffic.

To work out how many links your blog is receiving you need to look at your referrer statistics, external services such as technorati and the search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! Referrer information will also tell you where your audience is coming from. While it is nice to get lots of search engine traffic, clicks from other blogs shows your growth in reputation.

Traffic information also will come from your visitor reports. Some blog software provide statistics built-in, if not you will need to look to your ISP control panel, downloading your log files and using a hit report statistics package or using a service such as Sitemeter. Look at your unique visitors and return visitors, how long they stay (session length) and how many pages they view. Aim to have the graph of all these figures steadily increasing!

Popularity can also be measured by the amount of user registrations and comments you receive. If people not only stick around but contribute you are on to a winner. These are also figures you can compare month on month. Which posts got the most feedback? Using the number of comments and number of views you can work out your best posts and try to beat them.

RBI – Return on Blogging Investment

Popularity will tell you trends about how well you are doing on gaining audience and awareness but a professional blogger needs a payoff outside of ego concerns! How well does your blog convert visitors, that is how many visitors to your blog do what you want them to?

Most professional bloggers will use some sort of advertising. Outside of sponsorships and advertising space rentals these will be paid on a per click basis. Your conversion in this case will be the same as your click throughs. The major advertising systems will report these but it never hurts to have your own stats reporting just to be sure all clicks are being paid and nothing untoward is happening.

For affiliate links you will get paid when a customer purchases. By adding keywords to your affiliate tracking links you will be able to see which posts generated the income. This can be very useful if the purchase happens up to 30 days after the click, you might have forgotten all about the post that delivered it.

If you are selling an ebook or some other service then your conversion rate will be directly tied to “buy now” clicks. One blogger sells paintings from his site, another bespoke suits. They have direct feedback in terms of revenue.

It will be relatively simple to divide the number of unique visitors by how many of them arrived at your “thankyou” page. The better your reporting software the more control you will have over this process, especially if you have “paths through site” functionality. Work out how you can maximise people arriving at that buy now button, how can you funnel your visitors to make that purchase.

Out of all your stats the conversion rate rules supreme, it shows how much bang you are getting for your buck. Even if you do not pay directly for traffic through ads you are paying with your time. It is far better to “fix” your conversion rate THEN generate traffic than the other way round.

Your blog as a system

Your blog is a system, only you can tweak the nobs that control the efficiency of the system. You need turn up your traffic and revenue nobs to 11!

By looking at which blog posts bring in the visitors, ad clicks and sales you can only improve. You might not directly sell a service but you can still continualy improve your blogs ROI if you monitor some simple things. And what you measure you can manage. Look and see when was your best day and why, now go beat it!

It seems Technorati’s algorithm is not working effectively (read, broken) to rank blogs on their true worth. This post shows how one Blogger leapfrogged their system by mistake.

Any algorithm based purely on the number of links pointing at your blog is not going to be very effective and is bound to be gamed – just ask Google!

I agree with the poster, something else is required. Personally I thnk the best way of ranking blogs is by traffic .. providing everyone can agree how that is measured.

Every change you make has an impact. Cause and effect. Do you know what affect your changes are making? As we discuss elsewhere at Performancing, even the seemingly trivial changes can have massive impacts on usability, traffic and most off all advertising click throughs. What might look like a work of art to you and your template designer might be a massive turnoff to your audience.

I’m not trying to put you off meddling with your site! My advice is whatever changes you make, monitor the changes in your metrics and keep the good changes and rollback the bad. Most of all, determine WHY something works or not. (You do look at your stats, don’t you?)

Perhaps this AListApart article can explain better than I can. In the article Nick Usborne shows three designs for the same page, with startlingly different results.

Duncan Riley posted on ad sizes and placement over at the Blog Herald. Personally, I think a three column format, with ads (sky) on the left and menu on the right can’t be beat (and of course, put a medium or large rectangle in between the post and the comment box). But Duncan hasn’t done too badly either. I believe the most important thing is to keep ad placement in mind before you design your blog. If you’re blogging for dollars, good, prominent ad placement needs to be a priority in the design.

The Adsense team have posted a case study of Jason Calanis’ Weblogs Inc. You may recall that WIN was sold to AOL. The study looks at how WIN used channels and link units to take their blogs from $300 a day to $3000 a day. Nice work Jason and the team!