Passion and emotion can fuel action, but numbers drive revenue.
Each month I try and give some insight into what's working and what's not working in the sub-10,000 per/month blog. I'm sure I work as hard as the big boys, but of course I have to work harder to get traffic and optimize what I do have. Here is a quick look at my numbers from Uber.la.
click to view full-size image on Slideshare.net
*this presentation can be seen and downloaded at slideshare.net: Little Blog Metrics – Feb 2012
Here are the quick things I notice for the last 30 days of my numbers.
80% of my traffic are first-time visitors. I need to make sure I'm doing enough to keep them or get them to come back.
Top referrers from my social networking:
- Google+
- StumbleUpon
- The Mashable traffic came from my comment on a Pinterest "Design is Dead" post that seemed like a recap of something I had written a week earlier.
- LinkedIn – this number seems low, but perhaps most of the conversations are happening within the LinkedIN groups and don't necessarily come to my site.
- The SOPAstrike traffic came from my participation in the SOPA Blackout – referrals came from the Sopastrike.com site.
Question: with all the hype about Pinterest, I'm wondering if Pinterest only drives traffic to Pinterest. Why isn't it showing up in my analytics?
Long Tail Content Insights
Blogs are fine, but they do not lend themselves to deep content navigation. So we have to use other strategies to get people to our high-value but older content. You can see my 2009 content has a lot more hits than my 2010 content. And my use of tabbed navigation at the top of the page is bringing some consistent exposure to some of my content selections. How can I do better at exposing the older content?
The Last 24 Hours
KEY: Blue line is visitor traffic, orange dotted line is page views
What's cool about little charts like this (this one is from the Wassup WordPress plugin) is that we can see immediate results and trends. What ever I was doing at 9 – 10 am yesterday was resulting in some pretty high page views.
Recommendations:
1. Dial in the tweets and G+ posts to target deep content as well as new content.
2. Commenting on high-traffic sites can generate more traffic in an hour than the entire month of LinkedIN posts.
3. Continue finding logical groupings of high-value content for easier navigation.
On slideshare.net: Little Blog Metrics – Feb 2012
@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)
permalink: http://uber.la/2012/02/little-blog-metrics/
Check out these other posts about kicking ass in social media:
- The RIP Storm: Whitney Houston's Death Shows the Agility of Social Networks
- Crazy Little Thing Called Love: If You Can't Say Something Nice… Well, Shout It
- Sh*t Social Media Strategists Say (the viral version)
- Another SXSW – Another Dollar; Unless Somebody Else Is Paying, I'm Not Going
- Mental Jujitsu: Nothing Ever Works Out, Get Over It and Get to Work
- Fixing Pinterest in One Slide – Improving the Usability of the Fastest Growing Site in Social Media
- Love, Valentine's Day Marketing, and Computers: Dell vs. Apple Marketing
- Social Media MBA – The Reading List
- Pinterest and the Power of Social Bookmarking: Tag Yourself (Web Design is Dead)
- The ROI of Social Media – It’s Easy, Right? (return on investment)
We get social!
