It’s hard to even isolate the daily tasks anymore, so I’m taking a new tack, and bringing forward a new type of reflection. At the beginning of the summer, I attended a workshop with Rita Bailey, during which we came up with an example to apply the learning. The result of which was me getting a new bike. This is the bike I rode in the Providence Bridge Pedal where I learned about Spontaneous Stereotyping and Storytelling. So I’ve been off riding again, this time on a 21 mile trail created on an old railroad bed. I learned a bit about training, and a realized a few things about blogging too.

This bike ride was very much like the 31 day blogging challenge, in that it looked pretty easy at first. It was a gentle uphill grade, but it went on for miles. Sort of like the daily challenges, each one is simple enough, but adding a new one day after day, it accumulates. Just like my thighs on that long hill, I started to feel the burn. Because really to improve your blog, you have to take each challenge and incorporate it into a new way of doing things as you move forward. After two weeks, you are adding 14 new things to an already busy schedule of work and family.

In the center of this 21 mile path, you hit gravel, then mud, then a steep downhill and uphill with loose big gravel. Suddenly, the ride gets a lot harder. There have been some challenge days that felt like that. Great idea, but do I really want to take the time to figure out how to do it? On the ride, I didn’t want to disappoint my husband who was riding with me, and on the challenge, I didn’t want to disappoint the rest of the challenge participants. I had to find a way to keep going.

After a bit more gravel we hit a gentle downhill that was a great relief, and reminded me of the days the challenge tasks were to do something around advertising or monetizing a blog. Yes, I get to rest a bit. But guess what, after getting to the end, we had to turn around and come back up that gentle downhill. More tasks.

Then back through the gravel, the mud, the steep hills with rocks. This time though, it was easier. We knew what was coming, we could pace ourselves. Like the tasks from the earlier days of the challenge are getting easier to incorporate into the blogs.

Eventually we got to the top of what had been the long slow climb uphill. Only this time, it was a glorious several mile downhill coast with the sun streaming through the trees. I hope in a few months the tasks from the challenge will be incorporated into how I do things, and it will feel like a glorious downhill ride. I’m looking forward to it.

So, instead of going shopping to learn about blogging as per the day 25 task, I went on a bike ride. And I realized I have to ride at my own pace and enjoy the process. Tasks completed, at least they will be in their own time.

Creative ways to manage challenge overload.

The challenge continues, and it continues to be challenging. The crew is getting creative in finding ways to get the TASK COMPLETED, Done , Progress = Completed

Day 15: Make your posts sticky. Hey that worked! I have made posts on related themes.

Day 16: Create a heatmap of where readers click on your blog This was helpful as it showed me I had a category that was named About VisualsSpeak as well as the usual About at the top of the page. People were clicking on both, so I assume it was confusing. I went to change the name of the category, and realized the posts that were in there weren’t always remember to click on it.

Day 20: Run a reader survey I’m going to wait on this one until after the new site/blog is up. We will be going through user testing and asking for feedback on the new designs. Perhaps some of you will take a look?

Other challenges of the challenge.

Noticing those highlighted t’s are you? That is the Diijo demon at work. On Michele’s suggestion, I installed the toolbar to make it easier to keep track of things I find on the web. For some reason, it thinks t should be colored, or is it only on my computers? I have gone into the code and removed it four times, and the demon keeps putting it back in. If anyone knows how to tame this monster, do let me know.

On the Google versus Netvibes, the battle continues there also. I must say, I keep going back to my Google Reader, it is easier to read long lists of blog posts for me. Netvibes also continues to mark posts as unread that I have already marked read. Will function overtake beauty? Will my art degree be revoked? Stay tuned.

And how incompetent can a usually competent person feel? Try Twitter, Faceboook, Ning? So far, it’s like a junior high party where no one knows what to do, and I am feeling awkward and unsure. A colleague referred to it being like parties where everyone is watching the Cheetos go stale. Yes. I’m hanging in there waiting to see the great value I hear about.

And Tim keeps reminding me of the importance of photos. Yes, we are professional photographers and visual communication specialists. And I have used less images in the past 20 days than ever before. I’m going to have to do a photo post just to remember how. I do most of my posting from home on a PC, but all the software and images are on my Mac in the office. More organization needed to get what I need accessible from where I need it.

Hang in everyone, I am thrilled to be learning with you. And if you didn’t join the challenge this time, it is a great learning experience. I’m sure you’ll be seeing more from this group in the future.

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.

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

First impressions of the first four days- this is not going to be quick fixes and tips to transform your blog in five minutes or less. Like anything else, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be hard to be really good at it, so I shouldn’t be surprised. How to find the time to improve and continue to write for two blogs at the same time will be the first challenge.

Day One

Day one was about sending an email to each person who is a new commenter on your blog. What I realized about this suggestion is that I am inconsistent. I always try to respond, but sometimes I answer in the comments, and sometimes I email. I know most of our customers aren’t bloggers, and neither are most of the ASTD members, so I cannot assume they would know to check back into the comments to see if there was a reply. This made me realize I need to email every time as well as respond in the comments.

Day Two

Day two is to get a first time reader to read your blog and watch to see how they do it. Michele used her husband, which I realized could also be a good idea since it would also serve to actually get him to see what I have been doing. I’m still waiting for him to find the time. One of the hazards of being married to another small business owner. The promise is for this weekend.

I have learned things from reading the other accounts of the process. Michele’s husband reminded me to take the time to find images. Since we are an image-based company that should be easy. However, the server with all our photos is in the office, and I usually blog from home at night. I’m seeing that this blog improvement process is going to be a lot about organization systems and process improvement. He also had a really great idea about creating visual maps showing the posts. I would love that.

Laura’s Notebook talked about this process leading to exploring why she blogs. From that, I started thinking about where the appropriate place to post this challenge was. This blog is ‘supposed’ to be about inspiring communication through visuals. How does this relate? On the other blog I write for I am serving an organzation. Is this relevant for the membership? Ultimately, I settled here because I know many of our customers are consultants, facilitators, and trainers and would benefit from blogging. Even if you aren’t doing it yet, perhaps you’ll remember some of this sharing when you start.

Day Three

Day three is to search for and join forums in your niche. I already belong to several lists focusing on different topics. My challenge is finding ways to meaningfully participate. I don’t want to write something just to be able to include my signature line. On the rare occasion I have posted, I have seen increase in traffic to my site, so I know it can work. I suspect asking good questions could have a similar effect? Anyone have any ideas?

Day Four

Day four is about linking related content on your blogs together by going back into old posts to add links to new content. I am really glad I am seeing this suggestion now while the blogs are new and I don’t have a huge number of posts yet. I’m seeing the need for a blog maintenance strategy developing. Another thing to add to the to-do list. Wow, I hope this 31 days to a better blog doesn’t lead to 31 more things to worry about!

In the original post, Darren suggested updating your internal links every six months. I suspect that would be something I would find overwhelming and put off, but I liked this suggestion from Rob Malon

Instead of doing it every six months, I find it easier to do it after each new post. Just do a search on your own site to find the post you might want to consider. Generally I don’t forget what I wrote about in the past so I have a pretty good idea of 2-3 posts that I might want to mention my brand new post on.