Blog Monitoring 101
categories: blogging
I've helped set up a couple of corporate blogs, and -- for corporate bloggers especially -- it can take a little bit of doing to understand your place in the great blog-o-sphere. There is lots of advice out there about how to win friends and influence people with your blog, and I don't purport to know better than everything that's already been written. However, I do have one thing to say to people venturing into the blog waters for the first time: Google is your friend.
Google Blogsearch and Google Reader
To be an active participant in the blogosphere, you need to do more than talk -- you also need to listen. These two tools together provide great insight into what people are saying about topics you care about.
- Use Google blogsearch to search for terms you care about. Get the URL for the Google Blogsearch feed for each search term (in the left-hand nav of the Google blogsearch page) and add it to Google Reader.
- See what shows up; pay special attention to contributors who are cited by other contributors.
- Comment (meaningfully, not gratuitously!) on posts that relate to what you blog about, and include a link back to your blog. If you have a post that's directly related to what someone is writing about, include a link to it.
Google Analytics
I recommend Google Analytics because it provides whole-site metrics, in addition to page-by-page metrics. It's important to understand how visitors arrive at the site as a whole, because visitors can arrive at the same content in countless different ways.
- Set up a Google Analytics account and add the tracking code to your blog per the instructions.
- Watch Traffic Sources > Overview to see how traffic arrives at your blog.
- Watch Traffic Sources > Referring Sites to see which sites are sending traffic to your blog. Consider adding frequent referrers to your blogroll or list of links.
- Watch Content > Overview to see which posts are doing particularly well or poorly.
- If you want to make the most of your blogging efforts, monthly metrics reports won't cut it. You'll need to be paying regular attention to analytics information -- especially to referring sites -- to pounce on opportunities and to put out fires.
