Blogging Sueblimely

Google Analytics and AweStats are the programs I use when I want to look in detail at my website statistics. Woopra gives me a regular quickly accessed overview of blog stats as the program comes on my PC start up. The start of the new year seemed a good time to do some analysis on my stats and my blogging methods. I came out with some very useful information including some surprises. Hopefully this analysis will be of some use to you too, as an indication of areas that are worth concentrating efforts on.

I am a member of a lot of Social Networking sites, although my degree of participation varies a great deal. It tends to be based on which sites I enjoy, especially the social aspects, although these are also communities where readers are more likely to result. I know that I could be much more systematic and organized in how I expend my efforts online, rather than fluttering from place to place without prior planning or without following the planning. There are just too many sites to be successful as an online social butterfly – the wings are just not large enough, being a social Albatross would be preferable.

I know the theory behind SEO and increasing visitors but tend to lack in the implementation of it. Being a bit of a net junkie the time and effort requirements do get fulfilled but matters such as keyword analysis take a back seat I find this tedious, although I do tend to use openings that are hopefully Google Getters. This has become more automatic rather than thought out, although on writing the first sentence here I did have this in mind and reworked it.

To the stats themselves – I compared 2008 annual figures from Awe Stats and Google Analytics. Although there was a lot of variations in the two sets of figures, when I grouped the numbers and looked at them both in percentage terms there was much less variation. I split the figures into groupings based on the type of networking involved.

Entrecard (+ related sites) 15% – I expected these to represent a fairly large proportion although I don’t think they necessarily translate to readers and bring few comments. After initial enthusiasm I no longer spend much time with Entrecard.

Lists and Blogrolls – The vast majority of this 4% is made up of lists I have qualified for rather than blog submission sites – Top 100 and top 50 women Australian Bloggers, a Do Follow list. Sitehopping has brought a small but steady stream of traffic too. The the blog directory sites were not doing anything at all and by mid year I had removed all of these buttons. I had joined these sites when I first started blogging and before Social Networking sites had taken off.

The amount of visitors arriving from Social Networking sites surprised me, especially how many referrals Stumbleupon had sent, as you can see below:

Stumbleupon sent me 23,500 visitors last year even though none of the submitted posts received huge amounts of thumbs up – no “Digg” effects are apparent. Although I do send my posts to contacts via the SU toolbar occasionally, many more were reviewed and given thumbs up without this. I do not enjoy Digg and have not had any enthusiasm for doing what is needed to get a post rated highly there.

As SU took up such a large proportion I have analyzed the other Social Networking Sites on their own without SU.

Although I expected Twitter to do well, I was surprised to see Blog Catalog in second place and Technorati in third. Considering I have not participated in Blog Soldiers and the Good Blogs for months, and no longer have the widgets installed, they performed quite highly. I do not use Mixx a great deal so that figure is not a true reflection on how well it could do for others. Nuffnang Australia has so far proved excellent considering the short period of time I have been a member, although that could be initial enthusiasm that comes along with something new. It will be interesting to see what results arise being featured blogger of the month on Nuffnang. I am pleased that diigo did so well as it is my favorite bookmarking site, with good social networking features thrown in.

Zimbio, which is not included above as I did not consider it a networking site as such, brought me 9674 referrals over a short period of time for just one contribution; my Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images post.

I also had a closer look at which posts were the most popular. (Publishing links to older popular posts is always a good strategy, not only for newer readers who may have missed them the first time round but to increase the number of links within your site.

• New Rules for Domain Names
• Add Borders to Images
• Excellent Free Online Image Editing Tools
• Add Widget Ready Sidebars to Wordpress Footers
• Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images
• Adding a Favicon to your Blog

These vary from the Most Popular Posts listed in the sidebar because of different time periods used but both show how popular the image posts were. I believe I managed to get in quickly with the Domain Name post and it was a subject that attracted a lot of interest… The fact that the Favicon tutorial did so well is related to the nature of blogs. There are many posts and static website articles on this topic but this was much more recent than the others. It would be an interesting exercise to write another post on the same subject perhaps later this year, I suspect this too would do well..

So what does all this mean for the year ahead? I will concentrate my social networking efforts on the sites that have been the most useful in terms of visitors and most satisfying in terms of connecting with people. I will make an effort to participate more in Mixx. The Scoutle widget will reluctantly be removed from my footer. The concept is good but it has not proved effective visitor wise and the widget often causes very slow page loading times. I am going to continue giving Google Friend Connect a try – the poor lonely contact widget, which I recently installed, will have to be moved – again because of page loading issues. Nuffnang has yet to produce any ads and the widget’s intrusive size still bugs me.

I will also find time to do the full blog redesign that I have intended to do for a year, which I subequently planned to complete by today; to be installed in replacement of my Christmas theme. Instead I just quickly changed the colors and removed the Christmas images.

I hope these figures give you some indication of the worth of sites in relation to bringing in readers as, having read what others recommend, I do not think they are particularly out of the ordinary. If your experiences differ I would be interested in hearing about them.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Overloading yourself with online social network commitments can run counter to the interests of your blog. Joining too many networks, trying to please too many people and spending too much time promoting your own blog all take time away from writing. You are in danger of not paying sufficient attention to your most important social network; the one that is centered around your own blog.

What are some of the results of spending too much time on social media activities and not enough time on your blog?

• You may not post so often. Readers who visit expecting a new entry will not return so regularly. Your search engine rankings can suffer.
• The quality of your posts may deteriorate. Less time is taken for research and for writing.
• You have less time to respond to your comments and to visit the blogs of your supporters, some may be offended, some may stop visiting you so often, some may simply forget you.
• Conversations best carried out in your comments take place elsewhere.
• You may miss out on blogging events e.g. carnival submissions, memes, blog in unity days.
• You can miss out on being among the first to post and announce breaking news related to your blog topics.

You could likely add more to this list.
From a personal point of view:

• More important aspects of your life may not get the necessary time and attention they deserve.
• Your offline tasks may be neglected and even the people in your life may start to suffer.
• Trying to keep up with all the tasks you have set for yourself can lead to feelings of being disorganized and overwhelmed; stress, anxiety and depression could result.
• You may start to be short of ideas for topics to blog on.
• Lethargy can set in and you may begin to question why you are blogging and whether it is worth it.

This is not a cheerful post but I wanted you to be aware of what can result if you do over commit yourself to social media activities. There is a stage where, instead of enhancing your blogging and your blog, they become counterproductive for yourself and your blog. If you start thinking you are too busy with your peripheral blogging tasks or begin to feel overloaded then take some action to alleviate the situation straight away; before your enthusiasm for blogging starts to wain or your psychological welfare suffers.

I tend to hit an almost overload point quite regularly. I reign in my activities but in my enthusiasm for trying all that is new I get back to the same busy place again. I have my own methods of coping (writing this just presented me with the topic for my next post!) although, after being less than regular in posting lately, I realize they are not necessarily the most efficient methods. A rethink is needed. My methods may be good for my own state of mind but not so good for the blog.

Have you experienced blogging or social networking overload. If so how did it affect you and did you find any solutions that helped you?

Popularity: 6% [?]

After publicizing RSS Awareness Day, May 1st, I am a day late in taking part, although in some parts of the world it may still be yesterday. Not wanting to miss out on a chance of joining in with bloggers blogging in unity I had to get my own two cents worth in.

If your site provides a feed then you will be familiar with RSS. I know there are still many people who do not understand the concept nor use a feedreader. There are those who believe blogs are merely used as personal online diaries, which they would not read. They probably do not realize that many sites they visit regularly are in fact blogs. If your blog attracts returning readers who are not bloggers themselves, an occasional gentle reminder about subscribing would not go astray.

The term RSS has become a generic term to describe website feeds although RSS is only one of the two main methods of providing feeds. Atom is the other – the default feed for blogspot Blogger blogs is Atom. RSS is an acronym and therefore not pronounced phonetically as ‘ar-ss’.

Blogging platforms have feed capabilities built in to them and bloggers do not have to concern themselves with their own feeds unless they wish to take advantage of the extra information and statistics provided by services such as Feedburner. Feedburner creates its own feed for your blog and provides code for you to add to your theme or template to replace the default feed. You are provided with the code for an RSS button. A subscribe button in the sidebar highlights your feed as well as compensating for the lack of a subscribe icon in the address bars of some browsers. There are more subscribe options provided by clicking this button than those incorporated into browsers including subscribe by email.

The addition of a subscribe by email option is well worth having, to cater for those who prefer reading feeds that are delivered to their inbox. Your content is more likely to be read this way too, as it reaches those who do not visit their feedreader regularly.

I chose to incorporate a graphic I created into my feed code as you can see from my own feed button at the top of the first sidebar. I had no comments about this so it is probably very silly and I should remove it. If you want a snazzy feed button I talked about some free resources in my post Feed and Social Networking Buttons.

How you read your RSS feed is a matter of personal preference. I use the FeedDemon desktop reader which copes with my copious feeds and syncs with its corresponding web reader, Newgator Online. This enables me to have updated subscription lists on both my PC and Laptop. Google reader is also popular and allows you to publicly share your favorite posts. I periodically save my FeedDemon list to an opml file and then upload that to Google and other sites that allow my feeds to socially network with other feeds. (In the hope that my blog will also get some publicity.)

Do you have a favorite feedreader?

Popularity: 4% [?]

Image via Wikipedia

News

Darren Rowse is holding a Speed Posting weekend on Problogger – It is a long weekend here in Australia because of Friday’s Anzac Day public holiday so I am not certain if the “weekend” is starting Friday or Saturday – it could even be Friday in Australia but Saturday in USA

Darren has gathered 20 questions from his Twitter followers and will be providing a short answer to these and then throwing them open to readers to add their own responses. Sounds like there may be some real communication going on in the comments. As an added incentive Darren is giving away prizes to 3 readers who comment.

It is Darren’s birthday on Sunday so let us give him a gift by making this a bumper commenting weekend for him. Happy Birthday, Darren.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Reading blogs and other websites, participating in Social Networking Sites, doing research, dropping Entrecards can create an overloaded and disorganized Firefox browser. Here are some ways you can avoid frustration, speed up your browsing and be more organized.

• Keep one lean clean, mean speedy profile free of addin toolbars, sidebars and multiple extensions for quick browsing..

• Use a different profile for visiting other sites and social networking.

(I would not recommend using this many toolbars at any one time!)

To start Firefox in profile view, where you can choose which profile to load and add new ones: Go to Start Menu/Run and type “firefox -profilemanager”. Mac users – “/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin —profilemanager” (without the “’s) . From the profile screen you can choose to open Firefox in the Profile Manager each time you start the program. To run more than one profile at once use the Profile Switcher extension

• Keep your most used bookmarks at hand by using folders on your bookmarks toolbar. Eg – one for social networking sites, one for sites you visit regularly…

• Bloggers who take part in carnivals or regular memes (eg wordless Wednesday) or follow particular scheduled weekly posts may be interested in the Morning Coffee Firefox extension which allows you to organise favorite sites by day and open them in tabs. Thanks to Brown Baron for putting me on to this one. You could also use this to discipline yourself and not be sidetracked while working or studying, e.g. by setting weekend and weekday bookmarks.
• If you have the Greasemonkey extension installed the following scripts can speed up your browsing and make life easier:
  • Disable Text Ads – Disables inline text ads from Vibrant Media (IntelliTXT), AdBrite, Infolicious (lingoSpot), Kontera, Linkworth, EchoTopic, Targetpoint and MediaText (to date).
  • RSS+Atom Feed Subscribe Button Generator – automatically finds RSS and Atom subscription links on a webpage and insertsa feed subscription button to the top left of the page.
• It’s All Text, – speed up the process of writing in text areas (comments, forum posts etc) and do not lose what you have typed due to mishaps.
• If you are game to alter your Firefox configuration take a look at the tutorial Speed Up Firefox web browser
• Use the noscript extension to disable javascript, Java, Flash and other plugins for safe browsing as well as speed. You can choose which sites you wish to be excluded from the disable functions – It does take some setting up to do this though. Some love it, some find it annoying. If you do not want to use this all the time add it to your “lean” profile or to a new one
• It is wise to do backup or copy of your Firefox profile before editing your config or adding Greasemonkey scripts.
• It is always worth doing regular backups of your profile in case other problems arise.

Please let me know if you have any tips to speed up your browsing activities (apart from setting yourself a time limit that is – something I have rarely been able to achieve).

Popularity: 14% [?]