4th Birthday for whencanistop

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear whencanistop, happy birthday to me. Yes, four years ago the humble blog that you are reading at this precise moment was born (well it was born four years ago since I wrote this post, you might be reading this months or years since I wrote it!). So the question on your lips, is presumably how has it all been going? In case you were wondering, yes there was a similar post when the blog was two years old, along with a few posts before that about how the blog was doing.

In the four years of this blog my life has changed significantly too. When I started doing this blog I was working for RBI, a company that owned a series of 'news' websites aimed at the business to business sector. Blogging there was something that was relatively new in a business sense there and so this started as a bit of an experiment (firstly internally, then on this blog) to show some of the organisation about how it could be done. The start of a decline in advertising revenue meant that I decided the time to seek new employment to further my career and I started working for Serco on BusinessLink - a Government website aimed at businesses. This was a slightly different world from that of RBI - much more risk averse and that meant my blogging was a bit more conservative (little talk about work!). Now in my current role as a Business Analyst at a consultancy firm the shackles are back off again, but not quite as much as at RBI (you've got to protect the customer's privacy!).

So how has the blogging been going? The aim was always to write two posts a month and make them of at least 1,000 words each. So how has that been working out? I've included this one, just to massage the figures a little bit:

Two blog posts a month seems to be working at the moment. I'm also working well towards 1,000 words per post. This year I have only written one post that is under 1,000 words and two that have been over 2,000 words (averaging 1,350 words).

So how have the visits to the site been working out? That is as much a measure of the success of the blog as anything else:

I think that I could have expected a slightly larger increase year on year, following on from a record month in October 2010. There have been three months that have had over 1,000 visits in the month and that suggests that this is a successful blog.

Also useful information to know is that in that time my search traffic has increased month on month more or less throughout the entire time. In fact, most of the peaks and troughs that I have in the visits to the blog are caused by situations of large numbers of visits directly or from referrers (typically twitter, but I do also get a large number of visits because of the blogger tool bar up there, I don't know what causes me to appear when people click on 'next blog' but I'm sure it is something exciting).

One of the advantages of writing lots of long blog posts is that you get lots of long tail search traffic. This is particularly true of this particular blog. 8,757 different search terms have generated 14,480 visits. It's difficult enough to work out what is going on with a few keywords, but when half of your visits from search engines come from a phrase that was used to visit your blog just once, it becomes increasingly difficult.

In fact, just by looking at the visits generated by my number one search term, funnel analysis, give you an indication of how difficult it is:

Rarely do I get more than 10 visits in a month for the search term and I haven't got more than 20 a month at all. In fact, I did the same graph with all phrases that included 'funnel analysis' and it was only about double that. So maybe a more efficient way of looking at the data is by looking at the landing pages that people landed on:

So given this piece of information (I've included the top 11 here, because the home page is in the list and that is mainly brand related traffic), it is interesting to note that my conversion analysis post is the most visited. Maybe it is also interesting that I followed that post up with a post on conversion analysis in SiteCatalyst, because of the success of this post. It is also number 7 on this list. A wise decision you may feel. My next project should be to create a post on conversion analysis in other tools (such as Google Analytics). And actually, if you look at the data there was a marked uplift in traffic to those posts from search at the time of the publication of the second post:

So this makes the last part of this post interesting. Lets look at a drilldown of content based on the time of the post was put up:

Now this looks interesting that 2008's posts have generated the most traffic (remember that my conversion analysis post was from 2008). But it is an interesting way of looking at the data. Of course 2008 was the most viewed content since 2007 - it had the most posts and the most time to generate traffic. It is hardly surprising that if you look at just this year 2010 and 2011 have generated the most visits.

Finally looking at the actual content that people are looking at:

There is a post from 2011 in the list (all be it at the end of the list). This is the sort of thing that I will use to help build the next couple of posts, given the interest that the readers have in the subjects. It won't stop me from producing posts that are more news related, but I am mainly going to be keeping those to the new blog that I've been writing at digital transparency.  The top ten for those of you who want to click:

1. Conversion Funnel Analysis: When, How and What
2. New Omniture SiteCatalyst Dashboards
3. Learning to use SiteCatalyst
4. What Adobe should do for SiteCatalyst version 15
5. Conversion Funnel Analysis in Omniture SiteCatalyst
6. Omniture's SiteCatalyst HBX
7. Setting Up Campaigns in HBX and Google Analytics
8. Are any Omniture reports 'Standard'?
9. SiteCatalyst Excel client isn't quite as good as report builder
10. The difference between Accuracy and Precision

Six Tasks for creating a new blog

A lot of my time in the last couple of weeks has been taken up with a new blog that I'm working on for work. In case you haven't realised, I am going to be a regular contributor to the website Digital Transparency. What I thought that I'd do today, is give you some general pointers on it that I've learnt along the way and things that I still need to do, to give you a good impression of what to think about when starting a blog.

Task 1 Decide which domain to use and redirect any others

Obviously one of the first things that we had to do was make sure that we had the right domain name. Whilst we owned digital-transparency.com, we didn't own digitaltransparency.com (at the time). We've since purchased the other domain name off someone who wasn't using it and was open to offers. One of the first things that you'll notice if you click on the links above is that they both resolve to the blog. That's good in a way, but really we need to make sure that one redirects to the other for the best possible SEO. We haven't done it yet, because it was a relatively recent thing and we haven't had the conversation about which we'd prefer.

Incomplete



Task 2 Decide which platform to use

Whilst this blog is on blogger, we went for WordPress on the other blog. When I set up this blog I didn't really know what I was doing. Almost four years later and I haven't really made many updates to templates in the background, bar the odd bit to make it a bit wider and more usable. The background is still the same one that you'll find on many blogs and the colour scheme isn't great. I don't really have many plugins going on either because this is such an archaic template they don't work that well. I could transform it into a more recent version, but it serves its purpose (you can see my posts!), I don't have any graphic design skills and I don't really have that much time.

WordPress on the other hand is a tool that is easily customisable. With a large technology company behind me I felt I would be more able to adapt that blog, especially as we want to do many more things with it than the occasional post every other week. Moreover we have our own hosting set up already (one of the advantages of blogger is that they do it for you), reducing an additional cost that you can often get. So installation was easy and set up wasn't that hard. Plus I got our technical guys to build a branded banner, so it is all looking nice.

Complete


Task 3 Make sure the post has friendly URLs

This is a much easier task and I'm glad it is something that I did right from the off. Firstly one of the problems that I've had in the past with blogs arise from situations when we've tried to move them or tried to do some more advanced SEO. Frequently what happens is that you lose all your existing urls and you have to set up a whole load of new ones. This is fine if your blog is days old, but not so fine if has an established set of links pointing to the old urls. Sure you can do some meta refreshes for those that accidentally find the old pages, bur really you want to 301 to the new urls for the benefit of the search engines.

So I've made the posts so that they have the title in the url, something that is quite simple to do in WordPress. In addition, I installed a little plugin called HeadSpace2 that allowed me to state what I wanted as the meta description of the post. This is really useful for blog posts where you don't necessarily have an 'excerpt' that makes any sense as a descriptor (the first 140 characters of this post wouldn't be very useful to the person who finds this blog through search).

Complete

Task 4 Link to Social Media

When I started this blog almost four years ago Twitter and Facebook weren't really being used for much. Now I'm active on Twitter, Google Plus and there is a Facebook page (which I do keep meaning to do something about). They could have been invaluable when I'd first started, so I've created a new Twitter persona called @digtran. I'm going for a slightly different model with this feed. I'm not going to follow anyone else. At all. Nobody. It is solely going to be a news feed of all the blog posts that are coming out.

That may sound like a crazy decision - but we already have channels to do that through Twitter. As well as virtually all of us having our own personal account, there are localised versions for the Corporate name as well (I occasionally post stuff through @adversitementuk, but Nick does that more frequently). The other thing that I have learnt from my own username on Twitter is that is has to be short - too many characters makes it difficult for retweeting - hence the short name.

We're also looking at what we do with Facebook, Google plus and Linked In. At the moment we're not quite there with these, partly because the organisation has lots of different types of facebook pages and we want to group them all together.

Partially Complete


Task 5 Set up Analytics on the pages


Obviously I had to set up Analytics on the blog. In fact Google Analytics was probably the first thing that I put on there. We also have access to SiteCatalyst within the organisation (obviously), so I've started the process for putting that on as well.

As you can tell, I've started that process as well - I wrote a blog post about the things that I should be tracking in SiteCatalyst. However I haven't quite managed to put any of that into action yet. One of the reasons that I haven't done so yet is that there is still limited content, so it doesn't matter too much (I've been the only one to post so far). Also I haven't done anything about making sure that the cookies that tool uses are first party cookies. That is definitely a job for after we've decided which domain to use.

One question you may ask is why I can't just make do with Google Analytics. I don't have that much exciting going on that I couldn't just use it, but the rest of the company uses SiteCatalyst for all their websites and we need to make sure we can have reporting that comes through the same systems for all the websites. It also needs to be comparative - Google and Adobe both run different processing in the background which means that whilst their figures may be similar they won't be the same.

Partially Complete


Task 6 Start Writing some posts


Having set up the blog, the next thing to do was start writing some posts. I've been doing it daily since launch and plan to continue doing that. But we have a longer term strategy for the blog, because me posting 'news' style updates isn't going to accomplish the plan of driving more business to the company.

So we have a plan for the next couple of weeks and months to start adding to the blogging people in the organisation to get to the point of between two and three posts per day on average. This should be accomplished with one blog post by me, which will be news related and another longer, more educational blog posts by the 50 odd other people who work at Adversitement. To do this it will mean that each person will have to write about a post every month. We think that this will be doable. In the long run the plan is that we'll have guest posters who will blog under their own name (for exposure for them) but on our Digital Transparency blog.

The next step in this process therefore is to start putting more profiles of users on the site and also to expose those people in a more efficient manner (a custom home page is the first step).

The start of a long road