Archives for 2010

Community, Loyalty and the Power of Give

Last night on Twitter, I was part of the?#sbt10 chat, part of the Start Blogging Today project (disclosure – I’m a partner in the project). As usual, there were a ton of great topics discussed on how to make your blog work better for you.

One of the conversations that arose was how to reward loyalty – i.e., how to make sure that your blog community knows you appreciate them.

Michael Schechter asked how you’d go about that, and I suggested exclusive content as one option (similar to what I did with my free Facebook marketing ebook).

Of course, that approach on a blog would mean that to really benefit from exclusive content, your readers/community would have to be subscribed to a newsletter or email subscription. Which would then negate the rest of your readers that don’t subscribe this way, but still show loyalty by coming back time and again.

So what ways could you reward on your blog, for both subscribers and everyday visitors/readers?

Loving Your Blog Community

Face it, without a community a blog is nothing more than a broadcast platform. Your community nurtures the growth of your blog; it helps share with others; it defends if needed; and it keeps you growing as a blogger by sharing great insights in the comments.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a personal blog or more business-oriented – community is the real king (sorry, content lovers). For business blogs, community is the relationship to the sale – look after it and look after your business.

So what are some of the ways to reward a loyal blog community?

Exclusive Content

As I mentioned earlier in the post, this would normally be via a newsletter or email subscription, so may negate some of your readers (although it’s a great way to build an even more loyal community on subscription too). Some of the things you could offer could be:

A free ebook;
White papers;
Solid business advice not normally seen on your blog;
Discounted offers on affiliate programs.

There’s a lot you can make exclusive to really say “thanks for being part of my community”. You’ll have a better idea of what would appeal to yours – all you need to do is put that into action.

The Freemium Model

Because exclusive content needs an exclusive outlet to really make it work, you run the risk of excluding the readers that visit every day, comment and are as just as important a part of your community as subscribers.

So how do you make sure that you’re not ignoring them and focusing on your exclusive content?

Episodic content. This can work in two ways. You can either write a series of educational posts on topics your readers would find useful, or you can offer the first chapter of any ebooks that exclusive content subscribers receive. That way, “normal readers” still receive value and can decide whether to expand into the subscription option.
Actionable content. Want to be seen as a thought leader or serious blogger in your space? Then offer action points that anyone visiting your blog can take away and make work for them.?John Haydon does this all the time for Facebook strategies, while CopyBlogger offers solid tips on writing for search engines. Help others; help you.
Highlight your community. Another way to reward your community is to give them some reader love. By coming to your blog every day and commenting or sharing you, your community is helping you grow awareness of you. So do the same for them. Have them guest post on your blog, or post about someone from your community frequently. We all like to feel appreciated; make sure your blog community knows you appreciate them.

Protecting Your Community

Growing your blog community is the first part; but it doesn’t stop there. Just as your community nurtures you and helps you, so you need to do the same in return, but take it to an extra level – by protecting them.

Think about it – if someone’s taking the time out of their life and schedule to read and share their thoughts on your blog, the very least you should be doing is making sure it’s somewhere that they want to hang out, and feel comfortable doing so.

Make it clear you won’t tolerate abuse to your community. One of the best things about any blog is the comments section – so many great thoughts and ideas can come from here, and new friendships can be made. So making it a safe haven is paramount – protect your commenters, protect your blog.
Have a comment policy. Currently I don’t have one, purely because I’ve been really fortunate in having commenters who pretty much respect each other’s point of view. But it’s an idea I’m thinking of, and it can help you set both guidelines for new visitors, as well as assure your current community you have their best interests at heart.?Ari Herzog has an excellent example of how a blog comment policy could look.

These are just some examples of how you can use your blog to reward the people that make it what it is. There are a ton of other things you could do (and we discuss a bunch of them over in the Start Blogging Today forums).

You could use some of them; you could use all of them – the main thing is you’re at least doing something to reward your blog community.

After all, they reward you just by stopping by each time – thanking and looking after them is the least you can do, no?

photo credit:?jammcm
photo credit:?Kelly Schott

Why I’m Loving expo-MAX Analytics

If you run any kind of online business presence – blog, website, e-commerce store – then one of the key things to have in place is an analytics system for measuring your metrics.

This can be to gauge traffic, time spent on site, hot spots and much, much more. If you don’t have any kind of analytics in place, then you’re not seeing the bigger picture and missing out on valuable information that can take your site or business to the next level.

There are a ton of great measuring platforms available, some free, some premium, some of which I’ve spoken about before.?While I use a mix of?Quantcast and Google Analytics for this site currently, over the last few days I’ve been messing around with expo-MAX analytics.

And I have to say, I’ve been pretty damned impressed.

Who is expo-MAX?

Primarily an advertising solutions company, expo-MAX helps both advertisers and publishers to gain a larger share of their target audience.

For advertisers, they help you identify your strengths and eliminate your weaknesses, and tie it in with a fully monitored fraud prevention system so your ad spend can’t be gamed by fraudulent clicks.

On the publisher front, expo-MAX helps put you in touch with advertisers that are relevant to your blog or website. No generic Google Ads or similar – and by doing so, it should help you earn a decent return from any advertising you offer on your site.

But it’s the analytics package that interests me, and might do the same for you too when you see some of the cool stuff it does.

expo-MAX Analytics

While Google Analytics is a great free platform to measure the traffic, bounce rate and more to your site, often it doesn’t give you the information you really want (something Mack Collier points out in a recent post). So, good but not ideal.

expo-MAX, on the other hand, delivers a bunch of extra information with real-time metrics and then some.

For example, say I want to gauge when the busiest time on my blog normally is. While I can get this with Google, it’s a bit of a pain to go through the process of correlating that with other information relevant to that time.

With expo-MAX, however, I can see the time of day that gets peak traffic, as well as the country that traffic comes from at any given time. I can also see referring sites, the most popular content and the top search terms that brought traffic to me – all on the same page. You can then dig deep into this information for even more metrics.

You can see how this would benefit you as a blogger or business owner. Say you have a promotion for North American audiences – you can then tailor publishing that offer to the busiest time of the day for that audience. You can also look at the titles of the posts that gained most traction, and work that into your promotion as well (titles can have a huge sway on visits).

Social Media Analytics

So far, much like Google and pretty much most other decent analytics platforms. And for the most part, that amount of information will be all many bloggers need. But if you really want to get into where your traffic comes from, expo-MAX has a pretty cool trump up its sleeve with social analytics.

When you’re in your dashboard area, you can delve into your traffic sources and get a feel for who’s sending you the most traffic. Normally you’ll get some of this information on other platforms. But where expo-MAX differs (as far as I’m aware of from other platforms I’ve used) is by showing you the most prolific users.

For instance, once I’m in the traffic sources area, I can click on Referring Sources. This shows me the top 20 referring sites. Currently, Twitter is the site that provides most traffic to my blog, accounting for 19% of my traffic. If I click on the Twitter link, though, I can then see which Twitter user sends the most traffic my way (thanks,?Jim Connolly!).

Click on any of the other top 20, and you get more information again about that site’s top “providers”, if you like.

My current top 5 traffic sources are Twitter, Headway Themes (affiliate link), Google,?Networked Blogs and PR Daily – by clicking each of these, I can see what kind of audience I’m attracting and the type of link that saw them come here in the first place.

Let’s say you wanted to offer a customer appreciation promotion – you can see how having the information that expo-MAX offers in its social analytics would be of use.

Does expo-MAX Replace Google?

For me, yes. While Google Analytics is an excellent platform, it still doesn’t quite offer the amount of information that I’d personally want to use.

As well as the features I’ve highlighted here, you have a huge amount of information at your fingertips with expo-MAX. It even tells you what page of Google you’re on for the search term that brought your traffic (I found out I was on page one for the search term ftc social media guidelines, for instance, and saw how much traffic came to my blog for that term). Then you have conversion tracking, bounce rates, detailed drill down into information…. you need it, you pretty much got it.

I’ve only been messing with the tool over the weekend, and I’m already sold on it. For a free platform, it offers an incredible amount of information, and when I complement it with Quantcast for more detailed demographics, I’ve got all the information I could possibly want on my blog traffic.

From a blogger or business point of view, it’s pretty clear to see the benefits expo-MAX offers. Couple that with the very clean and user-friendly interface and support documentation,?the ability to track multiple sites?and the fact you can choose from a free or premium account, and I can see expo-MAX gaining a huge chunk of the web analytics market.

How about you? Will you be trying it, and what platforms do you currently use to track your metrics?

Note: This blog no longer runs on the Headway framework. Instead, it’s a custom WordPress design by Lisa Kalandjian of SceneStealer Graphics.

The Indecision of Being a Blogger

morning perch Sometimes being a blogger is no fun.

I don’t mean that from a, “Oh, woe is me, I have to blog” point of view. Nor do I mean it from a, “Why hasn’t my blog been turned into a book yet?” viewpoint.

Besides, how much of a letdown would a book that’s made up of recycled blog posts be?

No, it’s more from the perspective of getting the best user experience, without overloading that same experience with too much clutter (and when I say user experience, I mean it from you, the reader’s, point of view).

For example, anyone that’s read my blog for a while will know that I’m constantly experimenting with design, features and layout to make your time here worthwhile.

I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to stop by here, read what I’m thinking, and then share your own thoughts in the comments.

So one of the areas I’ve experimented the most in is the comments section. I’ve tried third-party comment systems (then switched back); video and audio comments; and commenter social profiles with Twitter and latest blog post options amongst other experiments.

And still I stay undecided at times. Just the other day, I tweeted that I almost switched back to the Disqus comment platform following their new updates, but that I’d miss CommentLuv too much (Disqus isn’t compatible and I think CommentLuv is one of the best blogger tools out there).

Another option I can never make my mind up about is social sharing. This is where, if you like the post enough, you can share it with your own networks (Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc).

I’ve messed around with a few options here too. Sexy Bookmarks, Add This and BackType are three that I’ve used previously.

Currently I use Digg Digg, which provides the floating share option to the left of this post. I also use Share This at the bottom of each post, to offer a wider amount of networks than Digg Digg. And then there’s the Apture Bar at the top of the page, which I’ve just switched back on and only comes into view as you start scrolling down the page. (Note: since posting this I’ve had to switch the bar off as it looked like it was causing formatting issues on my design).

Yet is this too much? Just right? Not enough?

There are a ton of other little things like this that I constantly question when I look at my blog. While I write what I’d like to read, obviously a big part of any blog’s “success” is its community, from readers to commenters to subscribers. So making your experience a good one is just as key as me writing a (hopefully) good post.

Perhaps it’s just part and parcel of being a blogger? Always questioning not just your content but the content area. And perhaps that’s why bloggers are such an oft-misunderstood crowd – if we don’t know ourselves, how can anyone else?

How about you? If you blog, do you go through the same indecision and similar questions? And if so, what are some of the things you’re constantly asking yourself?

photo credit:?bgblogging

An Experiment in Platform Exclusive Content – The Metrics

Last week, I released a free 33-page ebook titled 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook.

As the title suggests, it offered a few ways you could use Facebook to take your business to your customers, by using the platform’s various strengths – Pages, Apps, Ads, etc, – as a jumping-off point. But there was a small “catch”, if you like.

As an experiment in offering exclusive content tailored specifically to connect the relevant platform and users, I limited availability of the ebook. Instead of sharing via this blog, or uploading as a presentation on Slideshare, you could only get it via my Facebook Page, and only if you liked the page in question.

The reason was two-fold – I wanted to see how popular platform-specific content would be (after all, my blog would probably offer more chance of traction), and I also wanted to use it as an experiment to show clients how Facebook can be used to increase brand awareness.

And it’s been interesting to see the results. Here are just some of the key metrics.

Facebook Metrics

The day before the ebook was made public, there were 190 people that ?liked? my Facebook page. The day of publication, that jumped to 265. The day after that, 389. Now, one week later, the number sits at 466 at the time of writing this post ? an increase of?more than 245%.

Because the ebook was only available via Facebook, and only after you liked the page, I made sure that there were no “hidden clauses” once you’d downloaded the ebook. If you wished, you could unlike immediately – the onus was on me to make sure I tried to keep you interested with content that you’d find interesting after the ebook was finished.

So far, it seems to be working – only 7 people have unsubscribed since the ebook went live last week. I think that’s a pretty acceptable number for any new subscribers that came just for the ebook itself.

Additionally, the continued interaction on the page has stayed steady even after the initial “rush” for the download. Daily active users increased by more than a third, and new Likers continues to grow as well.

The demographic breakdown was pretty interesting, as it showed a distinctly different readership from my blog analytics. While the majority of traffic to this blog according to Google and Quantcast is male and 35+, the split for the Facebook page is a lot closer.

In fact, there’s little to separate things when you look at users that fall within the 24-54 age group. Something to keep in mind as I share content on the page in future.

Traffic and Downloads

Of course, the Facebook numbers only tell half the story. Once you liked the Facebook page (if you hadn’t already), you were then given a download link to get the free ebook.

To measure the traffic here, I used a vanity URL via bit.ly, and tied that into Google Analytics for web visits. Again, it was pretty interesting to see where the traffic came from and the peak periods.

The bit.ly traffic shows that my request to keep the download Facebook-exclusive was “honoured” (and thank you so much for that!).

While I wasn’t stopping anyone from sharing away from Facebook, for the experiment to work, keeping the ebook limited to that platform would be the best way to gauge how successful the exclusive approach was.

As bit.ly shows, of the 368 downloads, 358 came from the vanity URL, of which 340 came directly from the Free Ebook tab I set up on my Facebook Page just for this experiment. Only 13 “cheated” and sent folks directly to the download link.

I’m more than happy with this figure, though, as there were no hard and fast “rules” to stop anyone from sharing the download link outside Facebook. So again, thanks everyone for “playing the game”.

The Google Analytics stats show how overall site traffic increased both just after the launch, and with my mention on Twitter about writing the post you’re reading now. Connect that to the steady ongoing traffic?that the post is still receiving, and it shows that the experiment had, and still has, some good traction.

So, again, positive results – so far, so good.

Takeaways and Future Plans

So what’s the point in all these figures, graphs and information? After all, it’s just an ebook, right? Well, yes and no.

As I mentioned in the original post, I made the ebook an exclusive to Facebook to see how it compared to more traditional offers. The last free ebook I did,?Why Simple Works, was shared via my blog and Slideshare and could also be embedded or sent via email. That saw more than 1,400 eventual downloads, all told. So, a distinct drop in numbers with the Facebook one.

However, the 1,400 downloads for Why Simple Works only made up about 35% of the traffic to the various download options. The stats for 7 Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook saw downloads accounting for almost 77% – more than double the “popular” multi-platform sharing option.

It also saw a 245% increase in platform audience – something the more open sharing of the previous ebook didn’t achieve.

Now, think of this information as a business:

77% active participation in an offer
245% increase in your core audience
Jump in web traffic of more than 250%
36% growth in daily user interaction

If this had been a business or non-profit promotion and you had these figures, I think it’s safe to say that it could be viewed as a pretty successful campaign, no?

From a personal viewpoint, I’ll definitely be offering more platform-exclusive content (look out for an ebook on social responsibility within the workplace soon from the SRM Group).

From an experiment point if view, I think it’s something that can be of value to show clients why Facebook can be such a useful platform for promotions and incentives. And that’s immediate value right there.

How about you? Have you offered anything similar? And if you downloaded the ebook, was it worth the “extra step” you had to take to get it, and do you see value in exclusives?