bitly Archives | Ian M Rountree

So you’re a blogger! Good for you. You’re successful, and you’re interested in staying that way. Why else would you be here? You probably know your formula already, you know when you’re posting and when it’s effective. You’ve got your theme set up and it looks awesome, your ads are placed in all the best places… But how can you be sure exactly how efficient your posts are?

The dreaded numbers. Analytics.

Numbers can be depressing sometimes. They’re not consistent, they fluctuate, and if you don’t know what to look for, anything but a nice clean hockey-stick shaped graph in your visits and pageviews can look discouraging, or worse, stagnant.

When was the last time you looked up from your subject material to make sure people were reading?

I mean it. Anyone who’s managed to make a name for themselves as a blogger likely stopped paying certain kinds of attention to numbers long ago, because it becomes inherent in what we do. We make sure that, in order to keep up the quality of our writing, we watch the reactions we get from certain pieces, certain subjects and certain approaches, in order that we don’t slip.

But what about those of us who aren’t so good with tracking? When was the last time you looked at the visitors report on Google Analytics, or whichever other package you’re using to listen to your site, and had a small stroke because traffic had dipped for a day or two, just when you thought you were posting your best stuff this month?

Numbers can be the bane of your existence if you let them. Seeing any dips can be very discouraging. But it doesn’t have to be so hard. I’ve spoken before about using some free tools and easy metrics to develop a routine around analytics – especially when you’re just getting your steam going – to figure out where all that traffic is going when the dips appear, and why it’s just not that big a deal.

Do you know where your traffic comes from?

FeedBurner isn’t much on metrics – those subscriber counts and reach numbers can get a bit overly vague, especially to the untrained. But are you making sure you’re making the most of your use of services like this? You could, after all, just leave your feed at your own site, and not route it through a service like FeedBurner. But why wouldn’t you, when its so easy to set up? It can also provide a bit of encouragement when you’re looking at your numbers.

Sometimes page view counts dip. Do you look to other places on those days? FeedBurner, right on its dashboard for your site, has an “Uncommon Uses” button. There aren’t usually any uncommon uses to be had, but this page will show you how many exact accesses of your feed have been made in the day. Often, on days when your page views counts are down, the Feed Uses numbers are up. People are using aggregators or readers like Google Reader of Viigo to access your site. They haven’t abandoned you, trust me! What this means is not down traffic, it usually means down new traffic instead. If that’s the case, you might want to look at how available you’re making yourself outside the echo chamber of your own blog.

Social Media is a time sink, but it has massive value if used with intention.

We can’t all be hyperactive tweeters. But, if we’re careful, we can let Twitter do a lot of work for us. Fully one third of my traffic comes from Twitter referrals, and I usually never tweet about a story more than twice. You don’t want to sound like a douche, right? But every so often, depending what I’m writing about, I’ll see a massive spike in Twitter traffic. What happened? Someone with a bigger following passed on a post. But how do you know when this happens?

Bit.ly is your best friend.

One of the brilliant things about some URL shortening services is that they give you simple, off the cuff metrics to work with. If you tweet a blog post using Bit.ly for example, within seconds you can see how many people have clicked on it, and you’ll see continual running numbers appear as it goes. Bit.ly also aggregates all of the links generated through it, and shows you not only how many people clicked on your link, but also the total clicks, as well as who’s tweeting about that aggregated link! Retweets, new engagements, sporadic short comments – all of which would normally never make it to your blog, show up in near real time on the info pages for your links. All you have to do is go to your account, or add a + to the end of any given bit.ly link to see all the info made public about how that link has performed. If you want a way to get this stuff off to your blog to use as social proof, you can do that too.

Disq.us is your best friend’s wing man.

There isn’t a huge amount of community to be had just around commenting, but Disq.us does this fairly well; in addition to providing a socialized segment for comments (on which more below) Disq.us will aggregate Tweets and other reactions to your posts and drop them into a very nice looking segment below the comments. It separates and gives semantic meaning to comments made about your blog, even providing shortened URLs as cited in these reactions. This is of huge benefit when you’re trying to figure out the path of sharing. Even if you only see one referrer – say Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook, depending on your chosen venue for the original share – having the reactions cleanly collated has value lots of people miss.

Disq.us also has the side effect of exposing you to others, if you let it.

I’ve been using Disq.us for less than six months on my blog. While it doesn’t do too much for the blog itself – you can style your comments section however you want, and a lot of the things Disq.us does are homogenous – it does provide some interesting long tail benefits. For example, any registered Disq.us user who comments on your site gets a bit more visibility, because their profiles are viewable, comment counts in some cases, and some other contact information. I’ve made a number of good connections with people through their Disq.us profiles, and found a lot of good blogs to read as well. This is beneficial because, as we all know, commenting on others’ blogs builds great community, is good for your link juice, and ensures that you get involved outside your own echo chamber.

Not so threatening, is it?

Socializing your blog is a big deal if you want more traffic. Whether you’re a big name in the self-publishing world, or the tiniest of niche bloggers, traffic is paramount. But in order to make sure you’re focusing your efforts in the right arenas, you have to pay more attention than just looking at pages viewed and revenue earned. It doesn’t just come down to volume. If you really want to make the most of your efforts, learning to make use of small, fast tools to measure efficiency can make a big difference in the impact of every post you publish.

Photo by Ionusho.

I know this is going to make me sound like a geek, but one of the best parts of my day, running this site among others, is hitting up Google Analytics and other services and doing some good old number crunching.

Why, you ask?

It tells me how I’m doing. Forget the ways to blog – adding images, using all kinds of tricks to improve the blog itself, the posts you write. The real question I’m asking here is, how do you know what worked and what didn’t? My answer is number crunching.

I treat the writing of this blog as a very long-run experiment in advancing my own methods. How I think, how I speak, how I compose my thoughts and communicate with others. A lot of people who run non-journal, professional or semi-professional blogs do the same thing. There’s something to be said for cross-training in this. Much of what I do in my work life is verbal communication, but that’s useless if I can’t be agile in my thinking, and blogging helps me with this.

It’s very simple in sales to any kind to determine what’s working, as long as you’re paying attention. Do an A-B split test on phraseology for a day and see which closes more often. Test out some different facial expressions and see how people respond. Tone of voice. Arrangement of information (cost first, value first and so on). All of these different things you can play with, if you have the opportunity, to see what develops better relationships, communicates your ideas better, and does more for your clients and your business. Being in retail means I get to do this kind of thing on an hourly basis; you may have to spend weeks on it to start getting it right, but that’s a scale of business thing.

How does this relate to analytics? Directly. In sales, you either sell the product or you don’t. On the internet, in social media and especially with websites you control, the metrics are much more diverse, and managing efficiency is a bigger deal. How you go from inefficient splattering to efficient, traffic driving behaviour can either be formulaic, or organic. I’ll give you a few examples of organic.

Let’s say you have an idea for a post. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, just assume you post on your blog, and eventually want to figure out whether something you did worked, grew your cause. Where do you start?

First, Google Analytics. I use it because it’s free, and because it gives me a number of tools to use for valuing a post. Of the many things you can do is look at the traffic n your site for the day you posted. How many visitors did you have? How many page views? What was the average time on the site? If the time on site is anything like the time it takes you to read your post, chances are, most people read the whole thing. That’s a kind of success.

Next, I shorten. URLs tend to be long, so I use Bitly to shorten my links for sharing – but oddly this can also be a tracking tools. Look at this: http://bit.ly/info/6AFliW – This is the Bitly info page for a link to Scobleizer‘s blog. I made this link; notice there are a few clicks from the short link I made. This tells me making this link netted me a bit of value by passing on something I found neat. But also, notice the second number, the one that shows you the total number of bitly clicks for the long page link I referenced. If I were Scoble, I’d be enjoying more than six thousand (6000) clicks to my site from Bitly ALONE. Further down the page, you’ll find a click timeline, referrers listings, even Tweets about that short link. If this isn’t efficiency tracking, I don’t know what is. Making sure you get a short link for your entries gives you an entirely different set of data to work from than your home analytics does. Among other things, having this sort of reactionary dashboard for your posts is another kind of success; just keeping score here brings you closer to winning.

Speaking of tracking efficiency, I tweet. Praise be the Tweet. One of the first things I do when I’m considering a post is spend a little time on Twitter Search, Google, and other places looking for trends, keywords and so on. After the fact, I use Bitly to track reactions and reposts, analytics to track Twitter as a referrer – again, just being in the arena has its gains. One of the things I’ve started doing lately is looking over my bitly info and following everyone who tweets about my stuff. It’s courtesy on one end, and smart on another; if you’re interested in me, I’m probably interested in you.

This is a lot of information, I’ll admit. And I’m a bit of a tracking nerd. However, it boils down to three simple things:

Attentiveness is key to conversation. If you’re paying attention to how people are using your things, it enables you to create more of the useful things in the future. Raising the quality of your actions is the goal, all the time.
Winners keep score. Simple as that. If you want to be sharing awesome stuff, build on your better work, not your worst. Without knowing what people are liking about your stuff, you’re less likely to produce likeable things.
Pro-activity is far better than reactivity. By making sure you keep on top of where your words are travelling, you’re engaging in a way that’s more human and more social than just letting sleepy blogs lie.

The actual, step-by-step process I’m using to improve my sharing is still changing, but since I started using this very basic framework at the beginning of November I’ve seen a rise in my work – and if I’m noticing, I can only hope other people – you, namely – are noticing as well. What do you think? Better still, how do you keep track of what your work does for you?