31 days blogging challenge: Days 11- 14

The blogging challenge continues. It is getting harder and harder to execute the cumulative suggestions, keep up with all the other participants, keep commenting on their work, and execute all the ideas fostered by seeing what they are all doing. Especially multiplied by two blogs. And run a start-up business alongside my volunteer board work. I am still fully engaged, I am just having a hard time getting to everything. I am enjoying learning about all sorts of new things through the regular posts the challenge participants are writing beyond the challenge posts themselves.

Day 11: Look at your stats

I have Google Analytics on this blog, and MyBlogLog on BlogCascadia. While MyBlogLog gives quick and easy overview, it was not nearly as instructive for looking at what was really going on. For some reason I have yet to identify, I have not been able to get Google Analytics to work on BlogCascadia, perhaps because the blog is in a directory rather than the root folder?

In the meantime from MyBlogLog, I can see Blogcascadia is building readers, and people are reading and clicking on the whole range of categories of posts. By the clustering of articles, it does seem that people are coming with particular interests, and reading the posts related to that topic. We only have 28 posts so far, but have 46 comments on them, so we are building some engagement. It started between the multiple authors, but more people have joined us recently.

This blog is a bit older, just under four months. In the last month I was pleased to see the visits up 67%, pages up 33%, bounce rate down 17.3% pageviews up 124%, time onsite up 45% and new visits down 13%. While this did help me see I was improving, drilling down is where the more helpful things emerged.

The referrers section was particularly helpful. Readers coming from other blogs I have commented on are mostly new readers, spend a minute or two on the site and read a page or two so the bounce rate (those staying a short time or reading 1 page) is close to 100%. Readers coming from the challenge sites, have about a 75% bounce rate. Those coming from BlogCascadia are at 57%. This all shows me the majority are not finding value on the site. Could be that it is primarily aimed at my customer base?

I think so. Here is where things improve. Those who are coming in directly read an average of 4.36 pages, and spend 20:53 minutes on the site for a bounce rate of 44%. Those coming in from my company newsletter read 5.15 pages, and spend 21:20 on site for a bounce rate of 35%.

I certainly seem to have a better sense of how to engage my customer base than I do readers from the general blogsphere. This may be perfectly OK. It’s part of a larger strategic analysis we do on an ongoing basis for the company. Our original intent was to serve our customers by delivering more application ideas through the blog. If we decide we wanted to use it to reach new customers, we would probably need to make some significant changes to the current content. Since the blog is young, I am watching, but not ready to jump to a new direction yet.

Day 12: Introduce yourself to another blogger Day 13: Join an affiliate

I am giving myself a break here. I know my limits, and I am close enough to them to not seek new contacts right now. I am not blogging to build traffic for advertising, so an affiliate doesn’t apply.

Day 14: Analyze your peers

The original suggestion was to analyze competition, but I think of other blogs as peers. Great suggestions here, and nowhere near enough time right now to spend doing a thorough job. I do look at other blogs all the time with an eye to what they are doing well, and follow a considerable number on a regular basis. I wish I could find more companies who are developing facilitation tools. Love to hear of any you know about.

New challenge participants

Welcome to the minilegends, a group of 9 year olds from Australia.