rmurphey

Showcase related content to keep visitors clicking

Posted

I've drummed up a lot of visitors by posting links on dzone and StumbleUpon, but the visitors aren't very sticky -- many will visit the single page I linked to and then move on. Looking at my site exits in Google Analytics, I noticed that my category pages had much lower exit rates than my single post pages. This wasn't exactly a surprise, if I thought about it: a visitor to a single-post might see my list of recent posts, but there was no guarantee that any of them would be related to what they came to the blog to read about. Visitors to category pages, on the other hand, would see a collection of related content. I wanted to give visitors an easy way to see other posts that might interest them, so I just installed the Other Posts from Category plugin. The plugin adds links to posts that are in the same category (or categories) as the main post, and it's very configurable via the Wordpress admin. It didn't make sense to me to just have the list at the end of the post -- visitors might never make it there to discover other items that would interest them. A jQuery one-liner copied the list and put it at the top of the post, too:

$('div.ddop').clone().insertAfter('div.post p.byline');

Suspicious StumbleUpon Bounce Rates?

Posted

I've been promoting some of my blog posts by submitting them to StumbleUpon, and it's been generating a fair bit of traffic -- my post "How I Learned CSS" has done especially well. I've been watching my site using Google Analytics, and I've noticed that visitors from StumbleUpon have a substantially lower bounce rate than, say, visitors from dzone. So I think, "yay, StumbleUpon" and start submitting anything interesting I write to there. But in poking around in my Google Analytics a bit more, I've also noticed that, on pages that I've promoted through SU, I'm seeing strange navigation patterns: for "How I Learned CSS," 40% of visits to the page came from the page itself (and, as it logically follows, 40% of next pages were the page itself). The page was viewed a total of 4,700 times, but a little more than 2,800 of those pageviews were unique. Since bounce rate basically measures whether a new arrival went to another page before leaving the site, I'm not sure it shouldn't count as a bounce if the second page the user visits is the same as the one they were already on.

rdmey refresh

Posted

When I started this about a month ago, I just grabbed a template that didn't look too awful, changed a few colors, got rid of all the pixel-based font-sizing, and hoped that no one would look under the hood until I had some time to do it myself from scratch. With the holidays here, I finally had the chance, and I spent a couple hours this afternoon tearing down the theme I had and building my own. Gone are gems like

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Blog Monitoring 101

Posted

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

• 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

• 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.