Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

  • Copywriting
    • Content Marketing
    • SEO
  • About
  • Contact

Lessons from #blogchat – Blog Design

June 13, 2010 by Ian 3 Comments

Tonight’s #blogchat was all about blog design. It seemed like an awesome subject, having just finished off the first iteration of my new theme, but honestly the pace was a little too quick for me to really pull much out of it. Not a lot of moderation either – a very real conversation. One of the reasons I dig #blogchat so much is the varied tone – tonight was no different.

Above the fold is Manhattan.

I missed who said that one, but I agree – so much of our design attention is spent on holistic approaches, UI design and the damnable details that often when designing any website – especially a blog – we can forget to consider the depth of peoples’ viewing environment. Of course, this leads in to; are you designing for phones, or the iPad?

No one brought up accessibility concerns like high-contrast CSS sheets, screen reader design or anything of the like. I’m not surprised, honestly a little disappointed. But that’s something for another day.

Blogrolls are a waste of time.

So what do we replace them with? Blogroll pages, with details and reasons for why to follow a blog? I like that, but I’d offer going one step further; we do roundups all the time of blog posts, topics and so on. Why not do monthly blog roundups as well? Share the new, boost the consistently relevant? It’s all in the details, right? Organic and real is better than dropping a link on a sidebar. That much I agree on.

TweetMeme button and Fb like buttons – pros and cons?

None listed, opinion only. Not much discussion on this, but honestly – I leave a Facebook like bar on my posts and it never gets clicked. I had a TweetMeme button on my posts for two months and had no significant change in traffic or visitor behaviour. Why include details that do nothing for my visitors? TweetMeme gone, Fb bar likely to go away too.

Stupid design hacks: Styling Disqus comments.

@OrganicSpider asked about Disqus comments and styling – and here’s the answer. The awkward thing about disqus is that the styles are rather bland, and may not play nice with all blog themes. However, thankfully, Disqus comments follow a css style, which you can get by viewing the source on your blog. Style the disqus-related IDs and Classes and you’re set.

@JoeManna asked whether this should be done in Disqus settings or on the site CSS – I think this kind of thing should be carried in a theme style, honestly, mostly because you can better align the style with the remainder of your theme. Sure, you may miss some of the snazzy new images and changes Disqus makes to their comments systems sometimes – but especially if you’re using a dark theme, or some wacky avocado-shade colouring, you want to make sure the details align for a number of reasons.

All of the code for Disqus styling can be attributed to “.disqus_thread” thankfully, so it’s fairly simple to work down in the page source and get everything styled out. If I hadn’t included this, it would have meant white text entry boxes, and white entered text. Bad for comment writers.

Dates for blog posts, SEO for blogs.

Design seemed to fall by the wayside here – as soon as SEO comes up in any bloggers gathering, it seems to trump anything else, including good writing practice. People, seriously; if you write good articles, useful to people, which encourage subscription, sharing and comments – that IS your SEO backbone. This combination is one of the reasons – aside from updated content – that Google likes blogs so much lately. Not just updates, but relevance and encouraged user behaviour. Seriously.

As always, it was a good hour. And I’ll be on next Sunday night as well – wouldn’t miss it.

Mack boogied out at 9pm sharp to prep for a flight early in the morning, left the usual transcript: #blogchat transcript, June 13 2010
Naturlich, @KevinLyons also posted a participants’ list: TweepML #blogchat Participants list.

http://wthashtag.com/transcript.php?page_id=939&start_date=2010-06-14&end_date=2010-06-14&export_type=HTML

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: #blogchat, blogrolls, disqus, follow up, lessons from #blogchat, seo

Hack Analytics, A Participants’ Guide

January 15, 2010 by Ian 8 Comments

World's longest suspension bridge, in Hyogo on flickrSo 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.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: analytics, bitly, disqus, disqus is your wing man, encouragement, feedburner, google analytics, internet, social media, success, the-web, twitter

Categories

  • Announcements
    • Event Notices
  • Blog
  • Communication
  • Content Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Personal
  • Reviews
  • Social Media
  • Technology

Archive

  • January 2016
  • June 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • July 2008
  • February 2004
  • Copywriting
  • Blog
  • Reading Lists
  • Colophon

© Copyright 2023 Ian M Rountree · All Rights Reserved