31 Days Blogging Challenge- Days 2, 5 & 6

Improve your blog, Improve your reach

I continue to work on the 31 Day blogging challenge, albeit in a bit of a random order, as time allows. Turns out, this was a good thing, as I learned more from my Day 2 ‘First time reader’ audit than I might have.

Day 2: First Time Reader Audit

As others have done, I enlisted the help of my husband Mark. He’s very web savvy, but doesn’t read blogs. We started with the VisualsSpeak blog, and then moved to the ASTD-Cascadia blog, which I also write for.

I had started putting related links at the bottom of some of my posts for the Day 4 challenge. I noticed Mark liked to use the related links. Once he got through a series of posts, he would go to the recent posts. He was a bit annoyed when he would find a post without related links.

I also have technorati tags on some of my posts, but hadn’t gotten around to adding them to my latest posts. Here is where it got interesting. On the posts where there were no related posts, but where there were technorati tags, he expected them to act the same. The first technorati tag he clicked was something specific to my blog, so it brought him to a page on technorati’s site that had similar posts. This further reinforced his idea that the tags should act like related post links. The next technorati tag he tried was “training”, which brought him to a page full of personal training, potty training, dog training etc. That’s when he decided I needed to change the design of the tags.

I don’t think I can change how the tags work, can I? No matter what the reality of what can be changed and what can’t, the reader tends to think the owner of the site is in charge. I’m not sure what to do about the tagging, especially since the tags on Typepad hosted blogs do link to other content on the site as Mark expected, so others may be expecting the same.

The ASTD-Cascadia blog serves a professional association, so the post topics are much more varied, and there are several authors. We are in the early stages, so I still write most of the posts. Here Mark felt the related post links were mandatory. Even the ‘recent posts’ weren’t as helpful to him navigating, and the categories didn’t make sense to him. The catagories were set up to mirror the sections of our local chapter, so I will have to do more testing to see if they make sense to our members.

Like Michele’s husband, my husband didn’t like my photo. And yes, we are professional photographers, and I don’t have a decent photo. It is like the saying about the cobbler’s kid having no shoes.

As a result of this audit, I have installed the similar posts plug-in on both blogs. I need to continue to work on the internal links, and plan to integrate it into my postings as I create them. I need to further explore tagging and categories to make them less confusing. And I learned web savvy is not the same as blog savvy.

Day 5: Conduct an ‘About Page’ Audit

Let’s just say we have lots of opportunity here. When I originally launched our blog, my expectation was it would be read by our customers. It would be a place where I could write in more depth about the questions they would ask. I assumed they would know something about me already, or they would go to the pages on my website about our company.

Now that we are getting other people reading, we need to redo the About page. Luckily, my business partner and the other author on the blog, Tom has been working on rewriting a bunch of our marketing materials and our main webpage. I delegated the ‘About’ page to him, and he is adding more information as I write.

I sent him over to Michele’s new pages to see her redesign. He wanted to know if cut and paste was an option. I want to know how she figures this stuff out and executes so fast.

Day 6: Email a long time reader

Being a relatively new blog, I decided to keep working on communicating with readers. I don’t usually comment or email as many people at one time as I have been for this challenge, especially on posts with such similar titles. I’ve noticed it has been getting challenging to keep track of them all, particularly when people respond on comments.

I commented on Kate Quinn’s blog, and she emailed me in a really helpful way. She wrote a personal opening, added a row of underscores, then copied the comment she left for me on her blog, added another row of underscores, then a personalized closing. With the addition of a blog address, I think this could be a really good best practice.

I also want to look into the comment tracking features Laura Whitehead added to her blog.

The best part of the challenge so far

Meeting and learning from the others who are doing this.

Here are the other people who are participating in the 31 Day Blogging Challenge:
Michele Martin, Alex Miller, Brent Mackinnon, Cammy Bean, Frances McLean, Kate Foy, Kate Quinn , Laura Whitehead, Nancy Riffer, Smoke Free Wisconsin , Sue Waters , Eklavya