Communication – Page 25 – The Consulting Artist

Thank You

As many of you know, tomorrow I’m helping to make the Stop Doing Dumb Things unconference happen. Recent weeks, and particularly recent days have blurred as we (Peter Massey, Jonathan Wilson and I) have encouraged people to come along and made our preparations for the event. Last night we sent a note to all our guests saying thank you, we appreciate your booking. It is humbling and exciting that we’ve managed to gather such a diverse, interesting crowd.

Hundreds of people we know have helped encourage our guests to come along. To everyone who has read and retweeted stuff about the event, thank you. Every little nudge, reminder, and retweet helps, we appreciate it.

To the fine group of #connectinghr people I met with last week to share and develop unconference ideas, thank you. I’m conscious that was a stressful day for me, and my behaviour fell well short of what I expect of myself. In the heat of a passionate conversation I lost my temper and shouted at a friend. Sorry Mervyn. I re-learned a very valuable lesson, be mindful of others. Thank you folks for putting up with me.

Carole and Keira have supported and encouraged me throughout the planning for tomorrow. Steadfastly. We’ve had a lot of laughs and a few tears along the way. Such inspiration, thank you.

I’m off to load up the Stop Doing Dumb Things wagon and begin carting supplies to the venue, I’ll see you later. Tomorrow is going to rock. Thank you.

Writing by numbers

Back in July I blogged about the numbers behind the blog, and I received some useful feedback at the time, and I think sharing the information was useful for other bloggers too. A couple of months on here is a quick update.

Total visits to the site are up from 33,884 in July to 39,563 now. September 2011 closed as the busiest month to date with a small milestone of 3,003 visits, a step up from August which was the previous best at 2,076. I’m pleased with the increase in headline numbers and let’s look a little further.

Correlation

I previously observed a close correlation between number of posts and number of visits. Last month I wrote the fewest number of posts since January 2011, nine in total. Why the shift? Well two posts I wrote in September were particularly busy, Naked Whine and You Will Fail. Beehive Yourself, a review of David Zinger’s London engagement workshop I wrote in July remains popular and is drawing lots of visitors in from Harvard Business Review. And a post I wrote in June, Kung Fu Panda – The Illusion of Control is getting lots of hits. I Googled Kung Fu Panda and my blog post came up on the first page. Lots of folks are landing at that page and leaving pretty quickly too – sorry kids. You’ve heard of the saying an elephant in the room, well I have a panda!

Comments

At the time of the previous update, 145 posts had generated 708 comments. Wind forward and 168 posts have now generated 984 comments. I’m delighted that the level of conversation, feedback and exchange of views seems to be thriving. This for me is much more important than a topline view of visit numbers. As I’ve learned from the wise panda, you can probably engineer traffic flows to your site. In this instance it was completely unintentional, I had no idea he would be so popular but he’s costing me a fortune in bamboo shoots.

Sources

In the last month (with July 2011 figures in brackets for comparison) the traffic source figures are 15% (23%) direct, 35% (23%) search engines, 40% (43%) referred (almost half of all referrals came from Harvard Business Review last month), and 10% (17%) others. I note that folks referred in via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social type sites spend several minutes here per visit. Traffic from search engines produces briefer visits.

So there you have it. I’ve found it useful to take a quick look under the bonnet and see what’s going on, I hope it helps a few of you out there too. I enjoy writing very much and I enjoy practicing and hopefully improving as a result. As always – thanks so much for reading, and if you have any questions and observations I’d love to hear them.

A numbers game, sort of

I started blogging in January 2009. Since then I’ve had 33,884 visits to my site, 15,013 at the original wordpress domain and 18,871 over here. Over a quarter of the total visits (9,134 to be precise) have landed in the past five months. I’m pretty confident these are very modest numbers, and because I blog first and foremost for enjoyment, I’m absolutely fine with that. This is not the start of a pissing contest. I have previously promised to share information about the business and this feels like a useful place to start. So what have I observed?

Correlation

There is a close match between the number of posts I write, and the number of reads. No big surprise maybe, nevertheless the match really struck me when I lined the two sets of figures up for you this morning.

Comments

Since I moved the blog here in April 2010 I’ve posted 145 times and these posts have generated 708 comments. A lot of the comments are mine in reply to other people but I think an average of nearly five comments per post shows a healthy level of interaction. I get a lot of satisfaction from receiving comments on the blog. I try and take time to read and visit many other blogs and comment on them too – it’s all one big conversation to me. I’ve worked hard at this reciprocal concept and I think it’s worth it. I learn loads from the comments I get here on the site and of course I learn from going elsewhere to read and engage in dialogue too.

It’s not just about the posts

As you can see from the screen shot below, the pages and posts which get the most visits here aren’t blog posts, but stuff related directly to the business. I think this observation is really important, particularly for small businesses like ours. I blog because I enjoy writing, sharing and learning and the visits we get are looking at much more than the blog posts. This feels like useful marketing to me. I have no way of knowing but I’m pretty sure if our website and blog were separate, the pages about who we are and what we do would probably not get nearly so many views.

Sources

I think it’s worth a quick look at where the traffic to the website comes from. Since April 2010 roughly 30% of the visits are direct, 15% from search engines (Google a country mile ahead in that mini league), 50% are referred from places like LinkedIn, Twitter, HRZone and XpertHR (thanks to you all), the rest fall into “Others” (note to Google Analytics, that’s not very helpful). In the last month the figures are 23% direct, 23% search engines, 43% referred (a big chunk of this from Twitter), and 17% others.

I read a lot of great blogs which I imagine get a much bigger readership than this one, so I confess that writing this post has been a bit of a nervy experience for me. I can barely spell SEO let alone know how it works and what it does so there’s no technical inspiration here. I’m simply publishing this in the hope that people will find it useful. If you have any comments and feedback, and if there is any more detail you would like to see please get in touch and I’ll do my best to help. And of course – thanks as always for reading, I appreciate the time you invest here.