Archive for March, 2007
eriksr on March 30th, 2007
I started to read “grownup” books — the kind that stretch out to 800 pages or more — back when I was, oh, 10 or 12 years old. It was 
painfully slow going as I started by reading out loud. I then read to myself. And eventually I simply stopped reading the words — I just saw them and they went straight into my head. The amount of pages I could polish off every day was staggering to my local librarian. Over the years I’ve slowed down a bit and, my guess is, so have you.
Well, have no fear, Scott H. Young is here! Scott recently wrote an entry on how you can double your reading rate.
Scott’s suggestions made a lot of damn sense. For example, you should use a pointer, such as your index finger, to lead the way for your eyes as you read. In time you can just run your finger over a line of text and you’ll have absorbed it. Of course, you’ll have to stop sub-vocalizing first — that’s where you actually read words out loud in your own mind.
Let’s face it, we can all use a boost to help us get through our hundreds of daily Emails a little faster. Give Scott fifteen minutes of time to show you how to save hours by the end of your week.
eriksr on March 28th, 2007
So you’re not sure if creating and maintaining a blog is worthwhile. I hear you — everyone feels that way. I personally deliberated for minutes before starting Tech for PR. Hah! Anyway, before you go into deep thought mode, consider this: There’s no sense even thinking of building a blog if you can’t measure the results. So! Today I’m going to write a quick entry on blogging metrics. Why? Because if you don’t know how to measure your results you’re going to have a hard time convincing your client to go along with you.
The skinny
The good news is there are a variety of metrics you can use to measure your blog. The bad news is, it is up to you to set the weighted value of these metrics. And, the worse news is, not only is the numbers collection fairly unsophisticated (but, hey, blogging is in it’s infancy, so this is surely going to change), but it may be nearly useless anyway.
Blog Metrics: It’s a Numbers Game
There are five key areas you can track:
Visitors. The most obvious item to track are the visitors to your site. S in, how many are coming. More important, however, is the breakdown between repeat visitors and new visitors. You want both.
Page views. How many pages are your visitors viewing? Which ones? And for how long? Ninety seconds is good. Four minutes is great. Ten minutes is incredible.
Incoming streams. Where are your visitors coming from? Some of the heaviest traffic will likely be from incoming links (links from other blogs and sites). But you should also see direct visitors (visitors who type your blog address into their browser address bar). Once you know where your visitors are coming from, you will know where to go to get new traffic. And do be sure to follow links back to their origin — it is a great way to see what other sites are saying about you.
Exit points. Where are you visitors leaving? Do they tend to leave at a particular page? Do they tend to leave by clicking on one of your links? Once you know what items on your site influence your traffic, you can exert greater control on your traffic patterns.
RSS feed. You can also track who signs up for your RSS feed — certainly something you may wish to do because these are your loyal visitors. The ones that want to hear what you say so much they review your headlines daily. We’ll discuss this further in an article on RSS.
Where Is the Real Value in Blog Metrics?
Interestingly, the most valuable part of your blog is the one item that offers no metrics: Comments.
Take a step back with me as I explain. While blogs can accomplish many goals — information dissemination, brand awareness, etc. — where blogs truly shine is in exerting influence. And how do you measure influence? Offline, you put together a budget of $100k and call a research firm. Online, with its fluid and ever-changing traffic patterns, it is just not that easy.
But all is not lost. Online you can check comments, both on your blog and on related blogs. In fact, with influence as the driving force behind your blog, monitoring comments is the most important part of measuring the success of your blog.
So What Do I Do with These Numbers and Comments?
Use the numbers to build traffic, increase page views, and shore up unwanted exit points. And use the comments to help you determine blog post topics. It is only through the combination of the two that you will get visitors to your site and keep them there long enough to exert influence. Which is precisely what you want to do. Because it is through influence, and influence alone, that you will achieve your ROI.
eriksr on March 26th, 2007
Alright all you cool cats. You’ve got your Google News coming in via Email. You’ve got your RSS feeds bustin’ out news from sources you’re monitoring (hopefully via Netvibes, but if you’re using Internet Explorer 7 or something then hey, that’s…cool, I guess). In other words…Your. Clients. Are. Covered.
Now what about you? I ask this because sometimes we get so wrapped up in keeping track of who is saying what about whom that we neglect ourselves. I’m talking about anything from celebrity gossip to sports news, world events to horoscopes. Today, I’m going to introduce you to a Website that will bring your reading into modern times.
Spotback
Spotback is a news site. You can get all sorts of news from Spotback, just like any source. But the beauty of the service is how it tailors itself to suit your interests. Each news item on Spotback includes a slider, set to the number 0, that you can slide to the left (towards -5) or the right (towards +5) to indicate your interest in a particular story. Through this slider you’re telling Spotback what you’d like to see more of or less of. In my experience, Spotback was nicely trained within just a couple of days of casual voting.
Other Goodies
Spotback, of course, has a number of other tools that can be useful to a PR professional. Take a look at the top of the page — NewsSnacks is essentially an RSS reader that has Spotback’s sliders built in. You can also track specific keywords.
eriksr on March 23rd, 2007
So you have yourself a blog. Good for you! Do you have any idea who visits? Where they come from? 
How long they stay? And so on?
Well, you should. Because this is the only way you can monitor what your visitors are reading and ignoring. This, in turn, gives you an idea of what content to focus on to get the best bang for your buck.
Blog metrics: It’s a numbers game
Blog metrics programs are applications that measure everything from the number of visitors to your blog to what pages they view, how long they stay, where they are coming from, and where they leave. They tend to be easy-to-use and fascinating to view. Now, although most blog hosting services come with tools that give you this information — such as my own beloved Wordpress — for the most part, they aren’t thorough enough. No, if you want to kick butt and take names, you want to try some of the services I’m about to list.
Free blog metrics applications
1. Google Analytics. It offers quite a lot of information such as number of site visitors and where they come from. You need a Gmail account to use this, but now that Goggle has opened this up to the public, they are easy to come by.
2. MeasureMap. Yet another free service, this one also measures a wealth of data and has an especially good interface.
3. MyBlogLog. Not only does this application track outgoing links (incredibly handy to know where you are losing your visitors), but it also has a community Website which can be quite helpful if you hit a snag.
And now for something a little different
Crazy Egg. Just like the other options, this one is free. But, unlike the others which tend to rely on charts and graphs, this application generates a heat map of what your visitors are clicking and superimposes it on your site. Interesting. (If you like the heat map idea and want to see your site in real time, try www.clickdensity.com.)
eriksr on March 21st, 2007
Yesterday we learned what an RSS feed is, how to offer an RSS feed, and
how your visitor can receive RSS feeds. Today, we’ll talk about how your visitor subscribes to your RSS feed and answer some key questions about RSS feeds such as whether or not you should offer a feed and how you can use them for intelligence monitoring.
How your visitor subscribes to your RSS feed
Depending on how they access their RSS feeds (different aggregators have different requirements), visitors who want to stay up-to-date with your site can subscribe in one of three ways:
1. Click your RSS button. On this site, it is that orange button on the right.
2. Enter your URL (Website address) into the appropriate spot on their aggregator.
3. Click the button that corresponds to the aggregator they use. For example, if they use the Goggle aggregator, they would click the “Add to Google” button on the right side of this page.
While you will see the orange button on most sites that offer an RSS feed, it is less common to see buttons for specific aggregators. These generally are only on more tech-savvy sites, such as this one.
Do you want to RSS?
Absolutely. Even though RSS subscribers only visit your site when something of interest catches their attention via your RSS feed, they are still aware of you every time you send out a feed. Non-subscribers, on the other hand, are only aware of you when they bother to visit your site, which can be daily, whenever they think of it, or never.
Other than my blog, where else can I put an RSS feed option?
Anywhere you think of it, including the home page of your Website. However, one of the most overlooked, yet worthwhile, places for an RSS feed is an online pressroom. Why? It is an excellent way to provide information to journalists without overflowing their inbox.
Can I make money from my RSS feed?
Yes, but you need to have a substantial amount of readers every day to pull this one off. Some blogs – Lifehacker, for example, offer a few types of feeds. The first includes the full copy of a blog entry but also includes advertisements. The second is a partial copy of the entry – forcing you to visit the blog itself to continue reading.
Where else can I use an RSS feed?
RSS feeds are as good a tool to use as it is they are to offer. Subscribe to feeds from publications and companies of interest. It makes for a handy monitoring tool that not only is incredibly fast and easy (how nice for the content to come to you) but should save you hours of time.
eriksr on March 20th, 2007
If you learn only one thing about RSS feeds, learn this: They are the fastest, easiest way to regularly get your content in front of your most interested site visitors.
That’s the good news. But the bad news is they are also the fastest, easiest excuse for loyal visitors to bypass your site.
Huh? Let’s start from the beginning.
RSS feeds
RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, is a small script located online, typically on a blog but it can exist anywhere on a Web page. The RSS program offers a feed consisting of digital information that your visitor browses with a feed reader, otherwise known as an aggregator. This information is typically headlines from blog posts, but it can also range from notifications that a document has been posted online to alerts regarding a new podcast.
The RSS feed is then transmitted via the Internet to subscribers in real time (namely, the moment the content is posted).
How to offer an RSS feed
Because most, if not all, site hosting services offer an RSS option, you simply select to offer this option in your online site settings. More often than not, your RSS feed will show up as a button on your site, such as the orange button on the right of this screen underneath “Add Tech for PR to your RSS feed.”
(Of course, your RSS feed does not have to be a button - it can be any symbol or text or visual you like. But, more often than not, the RSS option is a button. I recommend you use a button, too, both for visitor familiarity and ease-of-use.)
How your visitor reads their RSS feeds
Your visitor uses a program called an aggregator to receive your RSS feeds. Aggregators can reside on your visitors computer or online.
Some aggregators are free; some are not. Here are three aggregators worth looking at:
1. Netvibes is a Web-based aggregator. It requires registration, but it is free.
2. FeedDemon is a desktop program (you install it on your computer). You have to pay for a full version, but if you are interested, I recommend you download the free trial version first to see if you like it.
3. InfoRSS for FireFox is a free extension for the free FireFox browser.
Aggregators typically display feeds in a number of ways. They show a window that is split, with the feeds on the left and the content of any headline your visitor selects on the right. Or the feeds appear across the bottom of the browser, much like the news crawl at the bottom of the television screen. When you click an item of interest, the content is displayed in a browser window.
How does your visitor subscribe to your feed, should you RSS, and can you make money with this?
All good questions. So good, in fact, that I will answer them tomorrow.
