Tag: blogging

Friday Fury – Bloggers!

I started blogging in late 2008 and I confess I felt a little like I was jumping on a bandwagon. There were a lot of blogs out there, why should I add another one to the pile?

This blog was started because I felt that there was something missing, a place for employee and customer and community stuff to collide. I’m motivated about making work better in order to deliver better service. I didn’t think about it much more beyond that – but I’d built up a few ideas to get me started and felt sure those and my passion for these connections would see me through. I was wrong. There’s a whole bunch of effort required to keep the train a rollin’.

Now it’s 2012 and it seems every Tom, Dick and Harry met Sally is just piling in. One of the by products of piling in is that after the euphoria of your first few comments and retweets comes the onset of frequent infrequency. It becomes clear that this blogging lark can be hard work, and the temptation to let it drift is often too seductive. The excellent A Better Mess blog says this about infrequency:

‘We crap rationalize with things like, “I’ll only write when I have something really important to say,” or “I’ll get back to blogging once I finish this project for work.” Rather than course correcting, the average blog dies a slow, painful and lingering demise. It’s a death march that not only disappoints your readers, it’s a public commitment that you’ve essentially neglected.’

And if you want people to read your blog, then frequently infrequent ain’t gonna get ’em.  And don’t give me any of that ‘I’m only writing for myself’ crap. Were that true then you’d be ‘blogging’ on one of these babies:

Typewriter

So get real y’all. Blogging takes guts, sweat, persistence and a depth of madness most folk can only dream of. And to that end, have a listen to this (lyrical kudos to @workessence for another musical collaboration):

No Comment

The dictionary defines arrogant thusly:

ar·ro·gant/ Adjective:
Having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.

The word derives from the Latin ‘ab’ meaning away, and ‘rogare’ meaning to question. Turning away from questioning, believing you have all the answers.

Blogs have a few vital signs, the number of visits they attract being one of them. And you can track other stuff too. Top posts, referrers, search terms, blah blah blah.

And then there’s comments. For me – this is often where the best learning is to be found. A writer sparks different thoughts and ideas in other folks’ heads and a debate occurs. In the best examples, we all learn new stuff, we all get another point of view. At the worst we might learn some new swears, and perhaps that’s not so bad?

So why do some folks (yeah OK a cheap shot but an example nonetheless) keep the contribute/share/reply/learn door closed? Closing a blog to comments kinda defeats the point of writing them, for me at least. I see a closed blog as more of a newsletter, a pronouncement or broadcast. ‘I’ve got something to tell you – take it or leave it cos I don’t give a toss what you think’.

Courtesy of @speccywoo I found this by @lruettimann. I agree with Laurie on the value of conversation, though for balance I should say that guinea pigs could take cats any day.

So I have two questions for ya.

1) Should a blog stay open for nourishment/discussion/points of view/wackos?

2) Who would win in a guinea pig v cat fight?

photo c/o greenpeanut

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.