All Entries Tagged With: "social media"

How Important Is SEO To Your Blog?

Depending on who you talk to, many people classify blogging as social media. To be sure, there are important social media applications that blogging involves. But is it all about social media or is SEO important too?

We believe that SEO is as important to blogging as social media marketing. A true company blog attempts to brand you within your niche while targeting the search engines with your most important keywords and connecting with your target audience through social media tools. You could see it as a three-legged stool. One leg is for SEO and the other leg is for social media. The other leg is personal communication with your target audience through the blog itself.

Social media marketing should never be your primary goal with a blog. It can be augmented goal, but you should use your blog to communicate directly with your target audience and try to sell them on the benefits of your product or service. But targeting the search engines with key phrases related to your niche is important too. How will you attract your target audience if you don’t reach them through the search engines?

Blogging and SEO go hand in hand. Social media makes for a fine companion, but it’s like your children. They don’t make the marriage. They are a healthy byproduct of a successful marriage. Make SEO your marriage partner.

February 09, 2009 | Allen | Comments 1

3 Social Services That Are A Must For Your Blog

If you blog for your business then I’d recommend the following three social media services at a very minimum:

Facebook
Twitter
StumbleUpon

With Facebook, you can have your blog posts automatically filtered through your Facebook profile so that your fans can read each post from Facebook. Your fans that are avid Facebook users are more likely to visit your blog through Facebook than any other service, even an RSS feed. Using Facebook in conjunction with Twitter is a very valuable combination. Install Twitter Tools plugin into WordPress so that your blog posts automatically post to Twitter. And you can create your Facebook settings to sync with Twitter so that every time either your Facebook status or Twitter status changes then they are both updated. So that blog post you just made that suddenly updates your Twitter status also updates your Facebook status. Powerful! Instant promotion to all of your fans on both services.

StumbleUpon should be used for its traffic possibilities. There is no automation for SU, but you can submit your content to StumbleUpon and share it with a handful of friends. If it is content worth reading then they will vote on it and share it with their friends. For many bloggers, StumbleUpon is the highest or second highest source of traffic.

Get bookmarked.

November 19, 2008 | Allen | Comments 0

The Weakness Of Twitter Tools

We’ve talked about Twitter on this blog a couple of times in the last couple of weeks.

Friday we talked about a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools. We recommend it despite some prejudice against automation where Twitter is concerned. But I do agree with Michael Martine’s analysis for the most part.

I like Twitter Tools because you can still develop relationships like Michael is talking about and still use Twitter Tools to automate your blog post Twitters. Since you will likely tweet your blog posts anyway, why not use a tool that does that for you? As long as you do not do it excessively then you aren’t really spamming, and as long as you are using Twitter the way it is meant to be used beyond your automated Twitter post, then I’d say Twitter Tools is a good thing.

But it does have one weakness (which is actually a strength). You can only automate three blogs under one account. Yes, there is a limit – and I’m not sure if it’s a Twitter Tools limit or a Twitter limit, but there is a three blog limit. Don’t try to automate all 50 blogs that you own. It won’t work.

So I recommend using Twitter the way you would normally use it, but add Twitter Tools to your WordPress plugin list and automate your blog posts. That way, you don’t forget to tweet them and they are Twittered every day. Plus, since you are interacting with others and being social in addition to the automation, and you aren’t automatically adding friends because you are doing it manually, it shouldn’t be an annoyance to other Twitterers. Uh, I mean Twits.

October 20, 2008 | Allen | Comments 0

Does Social Media Traffic Bounce?

If you’ve been blogging and bookmarking for any time at all you’ve likely heard that social media traffic receives a high bounce rate. I have seen that in some cases, but I recently checked my traffic at some of the social media sites that I frequent and I’ve found that just the opposite is true. The following statistics represent traffic from popular social media sites within the last month for a blog that I write for poetry, a popular blog within that niche.

All of these bounce rates are well below the average for blogs, which tend to have high bounce rates by nature. Most blogs are around 80% bounce rate due to people just reading one post and moving on. It’s interesting to note that my bounce rate from Technorati and BlogCatalog are both considerably higher – 71.43% at each site. Likewise, at forums targeted specifically to the poetry niche market, I have higher bounce rates (75% at one), and my bounce rate from other poetry blogs are also high, some of them reaching to 75% or 80%. What gives?

I’d also like to note that my bounce rate at Digg is 100%, but I’ve only had one visit from Digg in the last month (I’ve concluded that Digg is not a good place for bookmarking my poetry site).

Traffic Figures Unveiled
Before moving on, I’d like to point out what my traffic numbers at these sites are (you’ll see that some of them are quite low):

You could argue that the sampling from most of these sites is too small to be really analyze the data effectively, but I disagree. One would expect that the higher the traffic number from any traffic source would increase the bounce right, but that hasn’t been the case at StumbleUpon. In fact, I’ve historically received high traffic numbers from the StumbleUpon community. But I’ve seen my bounce rate get lower and lower. I think that’s very significant.

LitMixx is a new social community that I started within the Mixx umbrella. It’s focus of course is on literary bookmarking – poetry, fiction, journalism, nonfiction, etc. It’s only about a week-and-a-half old so the data is very fresh and I don’t have a full month of data to analyze, but what I do have is significant, particularly since there are only 6 members in the community right now. I’ve only just started promoting it.

My big surprises are with Reddit and Furl. I really did not expect to get as much traffic from Furl as from other sources such as Delicious and Mixx. I consider those communities much more interested in arts and literary topics. I guess not. But Reddit is the real surprise because it’s mostly a news site and if I got any traffic from it at all I’d be happy. What I sense from these numbers is that Reddit users will only click a link to visit a site if they’re really interested in the topic, but if they click on a link and read the material then they are more likely to stick around if they like something. Reddit users, in other words, are more conscientious. I’m going to have to do more experimenting with Reddit.

Critical Factors For Social Bloggers
I believe my lowering bounce rate at StumbleUpon can be credited to just one thing: Consistency. I have been a consistent poetry blogger for almost a year now. And during that 11 months I have Stumbled blog posts on a regular basis. I have attracted the following of several of my friends who vote on and comment on many of the posts. Even people who are not regular readers of poetry blogs like my blog because

It’s attractive
I write interesting posts
Though I write on literary topics, I do not write “stuffy” literati stuff that is over the average layperson’s head
I write every day, but only Stumble posts occasionally (in other words, I don’t spam them)

I think these are critical factors. If you have an attractive blog with interesting writing then you’ll attract more followers. Social media users in particular care about the writing style of your blog posts. I’m talking about people are interested in more than just “share yours and I’ll share mine.” I’m talking about people who care about real content that is interesting, lively, and well written. The StumbleUpon community is largely made of people who are there because they like the interaction with other people who care about good content. The same with the Mixx community; that’s why I’m excited about the new literary community I’ve created in LitMixx. I’m anxious to see how well it does.

New Visits And Average Time On Site
A study of the new visitors and the time they spend on my blog is just as interesting as the traffic and the bounce rate are. Consider these numbers:

Again, I’m surprised by Reddit. All five of my visitors from that site within the last month had visited the blog before. Either they are subscribers (which I have no way of knowing), or they are friends of mine from another social site, or they have visited the site before from a link saved to Reddit. Whichever the case, they spent a lot of time on the site. Only one of them bounced (left the blog without sticking around to read more than one post) and the average pages the five visited was 3.0. Incredible!

Note that these numbers only reflect a modest number of bookmarks at each site. For instance, since July 9, I’ve bookmarked at each of the above sites this many times:

While these numbers represent how many times my poetry blog has been knowingly saved at these sites by myself or someone else, they do not represent how much time I’ve spent voting for other sites submitted by others or making friends and networking. The time I spend at StumbleUpon on those activities is far more than what it is at any of the others, though this may change since the start of LitMixx.

StumbleUpon, I’m convinced, is the best place to go if you want new visitors to your website, but be prepared for those visitors not sticking around very long. I see StumbleUpon as much like sending out a direct mail piece. You might send out a lot of mailers and get just a meager response. But from those who do respond, if your content is solid then you’ll see some fabulous results. That’s been my experience.

Looking at the bounce rate of the poetry-related forums and blogs that I comment on, I’d say that the small amount of traffic that I get from those is due to the trust that other bloggers have with their readers. But the high bounce rate can be attributed to a higher degree of discrimination with regard to tastes among those who have a higher interest in the topic. In other words, poets tend to know more about what they like and don’t like with regard to poetic commentary whereas non-poets who read about literary topics may enjoy reading an in-depth analysis of a topic even if they are not as familiar with it because they’ll have less to disagree with.

Conclusions
Bottom line conclusion: I think social media bookmarking works if you do it consistently long-term. Most people still only bookmark their content occasionally. I bookmark my content somewhere every day, though I don’t bookmark it at the same place everyday (and I think that is vitally important). Another thing that makes a big difference is the number of friends you make at the social sites you frequent. At those sites where you have fewer friends, you’ll likely get less traffic and higher bounce rates. At those sites where you have more (and more loyal) friends, you are more likely to get more traffic and lower bounce rates.

These results may reflect what literary blogs are capable of, but one other aspect to consider in bookmarking is making sure you approach the right target. Where you bookmark makes a huge difference. Diggers have less interest in poetry, for instance, than Mixxers and Stumblers. They have a greater interest, however, in technical topics. And I’d always consider that.

Learn how you can have your blog bookmarked
at a different site every day for $100.

August 09, 2008 | Allen | Comments 0