ProBlogger: EXERCISE: Deep Dive into Your Content Analytics

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EXERCISE: Deep Dive into Your Content Analytics Posted: 03 Jun 2013 08:16 AM PDT Today I spent a couple of hours doing my monthly deep dive into Google Analytics. While hardly a day goes by that I don’t check my blogs stats (usually just to see traffic levels and sources of traffic etc) I try to set aside a longer period of time, at the start of each month, to do a little more in depth analysis. I find these deep dives are always insightful, and they often shape the coming month’s blogging. So here’s a little exercise for you to do today. It will require you to have an analytics program. If you don’t yet have one, installing one is your first exercise for the day. I recommend Google Analytics. If you already have some analytics installed, look at your stats for the last month. Looks at which blog posts were the most popular, with the objective of learning something to inform your next month’s publishing. There’s any number of things you can do this analysis including looking at: What was the post about – can you do a followup post? Was there something about the content that made it attractive to readers? A provocative title,  a great image, the voice/style of the post? Where did the traffic come from? Is there an opportunity to build relationships with other sites to see this happen again? Did traffic come from a social media site? What made the post shareable? Can you replicate this in future posts? What kind of comments were left on the post? Were their questions you could follow up on in a new post?   I did this same exercise earlier today with content on Digital Photography School. Here’s just a taste of some of the observations I made on my top 5 most visited posts on the site last month: 1. 3 Stupidly Simple Reasons Why Most People’s Photography Does Not Improve This was an older post I updated and reposted on the site. The lesson: sometimes posts from years ago can be given a new lease of life. I suspect the title on this post had a ‘curiosity factor’ that intrigued people into clicking to see if they made the mistakes being talked about in the post. The post had a strong call to comment with directions on the type of comments I was looking for. The result – loads of comments. The post was not advanced reading – it was 3 simple ideas/tips that many people could relate to. Sometimes simple posts perform the best. Traffic came from a spread of sources but it did particularly well on Facebook with little more than a link on our Facebook page. We also saw 2000 visits from a photography forum that I’d not heard of before that I’ll go exploring in. There were 30+ comments with questions asked – I’ve made a list of these to consider for future articles.   2. Getting Landscapes Sharp: Focus Stacking This one was a bit of a surprise for me when I saw it ranking as the #2 most visited post in the last month because ‘Focus Stacking’ is a topic that is a little more nichey/specialised than many of the posts we cover. My suspicion is that the title probably saved the day on this one as it states a clear benefit of reading the post in ‘getting landscapes sharp’. Benefits in titles often work well! When I looked at the stats, I noticed it had two quite distinct spikes in traffic coming into it. This is unusual. Digging deeper it seems that the first spike was due to our newsletter being sent and the second spike, almost a week later, was when it saw a rush of traffic from StumbleUpon. A few of the comments on the post ask for tips on the same technique in other types of post production software – these could make good followup posts. People reading this post stayed on the site about 40% longer than the average visitor to the site – it seemed to get people reading through the post at a deeper level. 3. My Most Common Portrait Mistake I had a feeling when we published this post that it would do well. The reason being… the posts about the mistakes I make seem to draw readers into the blog. This post did pretty well on Facebook. I’m not exactly sure why but I suspect it was shared by someone with a good following as Facebook sent quite a bit higher numbers of traffic than a typical post. The idea of ‘mistakes’ posts has given me ideas for a series like this but with some of our other regular writers. 4. 20 Photography Tips Every Travel Photographer Must Know This post succeeded for a number of reasons. Firstly – Travel photography is a hot topic for us on the site. We try to slip in a travel related post every couple of weeks. The title was another reason this post did so well. It signals a ’20 tips’ post, which sounds comprehensive and it makes a claim of everyone needing to know what it contains. These kind of claims always makes people come to see if they know all 20 (you need to be able to back up the claim though with solid content). This post also had some strong imagery, which always enhances the post and helps make it more shareable. Traffic sources were pretty typical on this one (Newsletter and Facebook were most) although it also did quite well with Google+. I managed to track down who shared it and have followed up with that person to thank them. Traffic was also strong because another travel related blog linked to it. I contacted that blogger to see if they might be interested in us writing a guest post for them – it could be a good relationship to have for both sites. 5. 15 Fantastic Freckle Photos These ‘image collections’ always do quite well on dPS so I’m not surprised to see it in the top 5. Our readers love inspirational photos. Having said that, I am a little surprised it didn’t do even better. We often see quite good traffic on these types of posts from Pinterest and traffic from that site was next to nothing. I guess freckles don’t hit the spot over there! Again, this post saw some nice traffic from another blog that I’ve not heard of before which gives me a great opportunity to get to know that blogger and explore how we can work together in the future. Interestingly the ‘time on site’ for those viewing this post was about half an average viewer. Obviously people just scan the post and then move on so while they can be good for traffic they don’t stick around as long as a text heavy post. That’s just one of the areas that I dig into when I deep dive into Google Analytics. I’d love to hear what you do when you look at your stats and to hear what you’ve found today by doing a similar content related deep dive. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger EXERCISE: Deep Dive into Your Content Analytics

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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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ShoeMoney May Recap Posted: 03 Jun 2013 07:25 AM PDT The first weekend in May we had snow on the ground here in Nebraska.  It was the first time in 70 years. May was an amazing month for us for the PAR Program.  We almost doubled our client base. I have started on a new book about marketing psychology that hopefully will be done by the end of this summer (more likely early next year =P ). Here is to a great June! May ShoeMoney.com Recap: May-03 07:00:17 - Free Shirt Friday – BoardShort.com This FSF is just in time for the summer! If you are in need of some new swim gear this year be sure to check out BoardShorts.com. As I was browsing thr…[more] May-04 07:00:53 - Hot New Internet Products April 29th â€" May 3rd. Here is a list of the newest internet marketing tools. All items listed are certified with volume sold and refund rate. Refund rate is a great indication of customers satisfied with the product. If one of these products interest you click the find out…[more] May-06 08:56:47 - Take Aways From Warren Buffett I always have a hard time understanding why companies don’t understand how to sell their goods or services on the internet. Well not that they don’t understand but more that they just don’t get it. This weekend was the annual Berkshire Hathaway week…[more] May-07 09:45:31 - “Put a Ring On It”: Advice from Gary Vaynerchuk I found this video when I was stumbling across some other blogs and I felt that Gary Vaynerchuk not only hit the nail on the head with social media but email marketing as well. …[more] May-08 07:00:22 - How I learned about TRUE marketing from a 4 year old Thai girl Sawadee Khrab (Hello in Thai) Greetings from Bangkok. If you?ve never been to Bangkok before, it?s hot as shit. 100+ degrees with 70%+ humidity every day. Oh yes, quite fun. …[more] May-09 09:44:09 - FTC Seeks to Cramp ‘Mobile Cramming’ It seems that every time the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announces new guidelines or brings a new enforcement action to try to keep pace with fresh forms of consumer deception emanating from the explosive growth of online and mobile technology, another…[more] May-10 07:00:23 - Free Shirt Friday – Solar One Media This Friday’s shirt comes from out good friend Taewoo Kim who as you may know does guest posts on this blog every so often, in fact …[more] May-11 07:00:34 - Hot New Internet Products May 6th â€" May 10th. Here is a list of the newest internet marketing tools. All items listed are certified with volume sold and refund rate. Refund rate is a great indication of customers satisfied with the product. If one of these products interest you click the find out…[more] May-13 08:50:54 - Email Deliverability Ninja Trick Email deliverability is a lot like SEO. Actually measuring results it is even worse. Some people still believe stats like opens and clicks are an indicator… thats a shame. In Email you are totally guessing unless you use something like our …[more] May-14 07:23:18 - New Yahoo advertising gateway In 2010 Yahoo! announced that they were killing their publisher network and were now referring all current and new users to Chitika …[more] May-15 07:00:45 - Dealing with Rejection Like a Boss: How to turn a Negative into a positive.   Opportunities are everywhere…[more] May-16 07:00:40 - Conversion Conference Chicago June 11th – 13th Chi-town, what up!?! Conversion Conference is being held at six different locations this year including San Francisco (already happened), Paris, Boston, London, Berlin, and most importantl…[more] May-17 07:00:44 - Free Shirt Friday – DNTX.com Happy Free Shirt Friday! Direct Navigation Traffic eXchange.. aka DNTX.com. They help you build a three step profitable campaign determining aspects such as if it is for a desktop, mobile, or a tablet device as…[more] May-18 07:00:48 - Hot New Internet Products May 13th â€" May 17th. Here is a list of the newest internet marketing tools. All items listed are certified with volume sold and refund rate. Refund rate is a great indication of customers satisfied with the product. If one of these products interest you click the find out…[more] May-20 09:29:17 - Turn them complaints into a positive. Good customer service is a staple for any business there is, but it is often times hard to come by. Many companies think they have good customer service when in reality when you ask their customers they tell a different story. According to Brad Tuttle …[more] May-21 08:11:01 - ShoeMoney Book Now Available @ Barnes & Nobles and Public Libraries Not that anyone shops at Barnes and Nobles anymore but I just saw on my create space account that they have picked up a large amount of inventory to stock at select locations around the country. This is really interesting news cause 2 months ago when w…[more] May-22 07:00:23 - Mike Jeffries Is a Jerk & Other Things That Don’t Matter In case you haven?t heard, Mike Jeffries is a jerk. A big one. Robin Lewis was recently quoted…[more] May-23 10:20:57 - Free Money From Chitika (Act Fast) Since Chitika has pretty much become the publishing and advertising platfom for Yahoo! (my words not theirs) I have been hitting them up to see if they can do something special for ShoeMoney users. I know a lot of people are new to the space and need a…[more] May-24 07:00:14 - Free Shirt Friday – Wish.co.uk This FSF comes from Wish.co.uk all the way across the pond in England. This site is basically a one stop shop for a ton of fun services in the UK area. These services include tours of …[more] May-25 07:00:58 - Hot New Internet Products May 20th â€" May 24th. (WordPress Week) Here is a list of the newest internet marketing tools. All items listed are certified with volume sold and refund rate. Refund rate is a great indication of customers satisfied with the product. If one of these products interest you click the find out…[more] May-27 07:00:35 - Dos Equis Attacking Online Affiliates â€" They Ain’t Pyramid Schemes Did the awesome alcohol brand purposely or by accident attack affiliates? That is the question.  In defense of the brand, anyone who works in marketing with big brands knows that there are many perils and obstacles working with legal departments. They…[more] May-28 09:41:03 - Cutting Edge ROI Tricks Gab Goldenberg did a interview with me last week making me spill my guts showing what we currently do to get the highest ROI for our clients and our own stuff. You can see …[more] May-29 08:10:13 - How Do You Come Up With Your Business (or Product) Ideas? Sawadee Khrab! Yes, I am in the sunny country of Thailand still. Insanely hot weather, even hotter (spicy) foods, and even sexier women: Something about being in a…[more] May-30 07:00:39 - Should you sell a course on @udemy? Udemy is becoming quite the player in the online education market space.  They have come a long way in a very short amount of time.  I have had courses on there for quite a while and I also consulted with them a little…[more] May-31 07:00:45 - Free Shirt Friday – LegalAdvice.com LegalAdvice.com is a website that was built by attorneys and for attorneys of the 21st century. They even give you free legal advice if you have a question. This is a great way for attorneys to get the…[more]   Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?

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