Note: This blog post is graphic-intensive. If you can not see images below, you may want to visit the blog directly.
The most important aspect to consider when writing blog posts is you.
I’d be lying if I wrote anything different.
You.
When I write blog content, I keep of a mental log of who you are, what keeps you busy, where you live, what kind of computer you own, how fast your internet connection is, how many children you have, and other technical and demographic aspects you’ve already shared with me.
Enter cookies.
No, not the chocolate chip kind but the cookies that run behind the scene and identify who you are every time you visit this site, whether for the first time or the hundredth. Data is written from these visits into applications, shared below, that help me provide you a fuller experience because you would be reading something you enjoy reading.
For purposes of data collection, you are an aggregate of many people.
Looking at the data in piecemeal, I first turn to Google Analytics — a subject I introduced 12 months ago, and again when I explained how one post quintupled my blog visitors. If you’re a long-term reader, you may remember that one.
Visitors to ariwriter.com over the past 6 months
Over the past six months — between May 21, 2009 and November 16, 2009 — I can see much textual and visual data about you…
What you use to get here…
Your browsers and operating systems
How long you stay here…
Your length of stay
How loyal you are to return here…
Your loyalty
Whether you have a fast or slow connection to ascertain whether graphics like this blog post are OK or detrimental to your browsing experience. Add a comment below if you’re using a dial-up connection?…
Your connection speeds
How you got here (out of 1,144 traffic sources)…
What brought you here
Your top 10 (out of 19) favorite search engines…
Your search engines
…and so forth.
Once I’ve exhausted the data perspectives on Google Analytics, I then turn to Quantcast for a different set of benchmarks.
While GA is predominantly about your computer, your browser, search engines, and referring sites, Quantcast follows you around the web to see where else you go and what you do to guesstimate your age, ethnicity, age of your children, and more. Everything is an aggregate; no personal information is tracked and I, for one, don’t have access to anything other than what you, too, can see from this link.
Quantcast tells me the average version of you is a college-educated, middle-aged Caucasian male with teenage kids living in the house and earning an annual salary under $60,000.
Does that sound about right?
Here’s a demographic snapshot:
Quantcast demographics of ariwriter.com
…and here’s a snapshot of your geography:
Quantcast geography at ariwriter.com
Third, comparative sites like Compete.com enable to me to gauge who’s visiting my blog in relation to other blogs to ascertain what I might want to write about to “steal” their readers to come here, whether via intelligent comments on their blog posts or flat-out writing about topics that search engines will eventually index.
For instance, comparing unique visitors at AriWriter against Marc Meyer’s at directmarketingobservations.com and Josh Peters’ at shuaism.com over the same six month period yields this graph:
Collective intelligence from compete.com
If you head over to compete.com yourself, you can cut and paste different domains. The free version allows up to three domains to be compared together.
Sometimes, I like to plug in random websites to see where I stack, such as this graph showing me against a bigger blogger/author, and GovLoop.com with its 20,000+ government accounts:
Different intelligence
Fourth and definitely not least, I browse through my blog archive and draw upon categories and past months to see what I feel like writing about again that you may have liked.
I also use WordPress plugins like Popularity Contest to gauge which posts saw the most amount of comments, an indicator a similar topic again may prove useful to you and your colleagues.
You.
That’s the beginning of how to write blog content for your readers, anyway. Can you think of a better metric to gauge content creation than who reads your content in the first place? Do you understand why I focused this on me and my readers to give you an idea how to focus it on you and your readers?
There are other ways to learn who your readers are and why they may return and what to write to bring them back, but those are subjects for other articles. Thoughts? What am I missing? What would you like to learn in more detail?
Related articles you may enjoy:
{ 8 comments }
This is a great post.
I like that you show people how all of this info is received and used to move on.
I have used most of these things, but I was not familiar with compete.com. I will definitely be checking this out for future references.
Thanks!
Twitter: JoshSPeters
November 19, 2009 at 2:27 AM
First off thanks for mentioning my blog. This is really a great outline of measuring and the type of analytical data you’ve compiled here. I really like the way you laid it out. One of the things I’ve used in the past to find out what people are interested in is to “stalk” them using Disqus and see what they are saying on other blogs and comments they are leaving.
.-= New from Josh Peters: Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition =-.
You identify yourself as a stalker, eh? You should be more anonymous…or brand yourself a groupie.
You only have to think about what happens when someone arrives on your website and either cannot make sense of what you have written or, equally as important, cannot find the information they are looking for. They simply leave again and go and look for a different website or blog that does provide the information they want in a format they enjoy and in a place they can find it.
This is a great post But the only issue I have is that most people wouldn’t add all those metrics to help build their blog to a high standard. In fact, over 90% of bloggers give up in the first year before that establish themselves as reputable blogger.
Other than that, the big boys (and girls?) use all the methods you mentioned above. As for me, I have only used Google Analytics and should actually look into using cookie and Quantcast too.
Nice post btw
Perhaps individual bloggers who view their writings more as a journal wouldn’t run metrics, but would a corporate blog not?
Google analytics are very helpful in know much about the visitors, it provides the full information about the browser and browser capability, which helps in improving the visitors visibility,
thanks for the resource.
Twitter Comment
Got 3 minutes? Make sure you’re measuring your blog’s progress. Some geeky advice for doing so. [link to post]
– Posted using Chat Catcher
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