Blogging About Blogging

Tia Graham, theblogsultant.com

Conversational Branding

I haven’t had a lot of time lately for talking about doing because I’ve been too busy, well DOING.  Life Has Been Full and Has Been Full of Life. But the world of social marketing is changing and redefining (when does it ever stop?), and in my spare moments while stuck in traffic, chopping vegetables, or dipping sushi pieces into wasabi-rich soy sauce, I’m contemplating those changes and how my business needs to anticipate them.

Notice I said, “anticipate them” rather than “adapt to them”; important distinction there in how I view my business…the vision, though maybe not all the manifestations, are fluid instead of static. I may rarely succeed on being ahead of the curve on several things but I instinctively feel that doing so needs to always be my goal.

I’m still sorting out the changes, trying a few on for size, and remaining open to possibility. I’m not the only one out there doing the same; here are a few voices I’ve been reading lately. I read them because they are bloggers who value conversational branding, which I think may be the essence of what is going on with relational media these days.

  • she’s done it in many posts but this is her most recent record of her Twitter Exploration. Penelope never fails to get me thinking and this is fantastic food for thought: when branding, how important is it to be the same in every compartment?
  • Scott, over at Man Vs. Blog, has been exploring his use of Twitter and has a 3 part series worth reading.
  • My very favorite blog guru, Darren Rowse, has a brilliant title followed by his typically-excellent content, looking at formats like the one Twitter uses, and just above, shares his exploration of another, Plurk.

My blogging list of things to do seems endless, with all kinds of things near the top vying for space. For instance, I have a great header I had designed for this site, a brand new business site needing launching, and a journal full of article ideas just begging me to find a quiet moment to sit down and seriously write. My client’s sites all have lists and my search for an assistant became so much of it’s own endeavor that I had to either find an assistant to help me find an assistant or cut out the search! When a new internet “exploration” becomes necessary so often, it’s helpful to know other bloggers I’m watching are exploring as well. It’s that synergy that the internet and social media thrives on and no one gets anywhere alone.

I think in “conversational branding” my favorite part is still the conversation. To me, that is the literate beauty of this media-rich tool we all use.


Aweber: a Customer Service review

Blogrush is working on some issues and still has dashboards down; I did notice in doing month end traffic reports yesterday that I have seen traffic on all my sites coming in via blogrush. So we will optimistically wait to see what they unveil.

Mumdinger is unfortunately, not something I can give any more time to. Maybe later when they are bigger. Right now, I’ve seen so little change on the site that I must cut it from my daily intinerary.

But last week I set out to vamp up my weekly newsletter a bit. It had a long way to go; until then I was just sending out a group, plain text email! I started with FeedBlitz, having heard good things about it on recommendation. But after two frustrating hours I gave up and went to my second choice, which ironically should have been my first! Aweber.

Set up was easy. Within a half hour I had my first newsletter created and distributed in graphics that complimented my theme. Two days later I got a phone call…knock me over with a feather! It was someone from the company welcoming me and wondering if I had any questions; I was so bummed that I was driving and had to let voicemail get it! But wonders of wonders, the next day I got a letter in the snail mailbox…more welcome, more offers of help should I have any questions!

Now mail-outs and phone calls can be intrusive and I usually view them that way. This time though, I felt like they actually cared to have my business. I felt that there genuinely offering their assistance and that it matters to them if I’m satisfied or not. Today I need to create another newsletter and I’m actually a little giddy looking forward to it! I am totally relaxed about something I’d been procrastinating on, knowing that if I run into any problems, they are approachable for help. Wow!

Hats of to you Aweber! I’m proud to be using your service! Thanks for making me feel valued as one of your customers.


Mumdinger and BlogRush Update

So a week into using both, here’s a sampling of how things are going:

Mumdinger is showing itself to be tiny and slow. There is little new content and what is there is added and ranked at a snail’s pace. The stories I submitted didn’t receive many votes…but neither do their “top” stories so it seems to be of little consequence. Maybe this is a matter of “more time will tell”, which I’m willing to allow for. But they ought to come with some ways to drive some traffic their way; a site like that NEEDS the participation of many in order to succeed.

BlogRush….I have over 1700 impressions…to 2 click throughs. They say the click thru rate is artificially low due to some abuses of the system that should be cleared up shortly. Last week I had over a thousand “credits” but today I have a negative number….not sure I understand that, nor is a burning issue on my hot plate today.

The jury is still out on both traffic services.


Digg With a Feminine Touch: Mumdinger

Well BlogRush has brought me one success: easier surfing for similar sites within my category! Common advice for site growth is to find sites similar to yours and link to them but time has always been a factor me in hunting down sources. BlogRush brings them right to my site! So score one for “will work nicely” for this new service.

THIS post though, isn’t about BlogRush…it’s about Mumdinger, which is like Digg for Women. One of my hesitations with Digg is that some of my sites aren’t a good fit for it’s niches and “womens issues” and “mommy blog fodder” definitely fit into that category! One of my blogs is about *my* life, which includes children and a working-from-home-mother, and safety recalls, and headlice. It’s “global” in a whole ‘nuther way. Mumdinger looks like a fantastic service; I’ve registered and submitted a few posts. I’ll let ya know how it goes!


BlogRush: Will it work?

Darren on problogger has, what I believe to be quite honestly, presented a fairly new traffic-building tool called BlogRush.com. It’s getting some mixed press and today the founder sent out a thorough email detailing the ups, downs, and future plans of the service. I’m trying it out on all my sites….which is a daring step for me. Usually when I try something new I test-drive it on one site or two; not the whole lot of ‘em. But I’m on the optimistic side of cautious in expecting results so I went ahead and tried it full steam.

So far, I’m a little conflicted over the look of the widgit. It’s very appropriate on some sites; not so much on the other, and there is no flexibility in appearance. The stories in some of the categories vary widely in quality. For instance: my sixredheads.com was first listed under “lifestyle” but the stories linked in the widget were mostly gross and cheesy so I changed it to “parenting/family” because that is where the majority of my traffic resides, though my content really applies to more than just “mommy bloggers”. If I had to guess, the best content probably lies in the male-dominated categories because they are the predominant ones out there learning about new tech options at an uneven ratio.

We’ll see. Not unlike blogs themselves, I think traffic-generating sites MUST have great content and a lot of it. Highest on my list of priorities from services like Blog Rush is getting links with other *quality* sites; incoming traffic or not, I’ll pull the widgits if the linked stories detract from the environment I’ve worked hard to create. Only time is going to tell on that one and time is what I’m giving BlogRush.


Size Matters: When the underdog threatens to surpass the Big Guns

It occurred to me that in my contest over the previous week I handled Stumble, Digg, Reddit, and Thoof as if they were equal peers. In fact, they are not the same in either age nor size, yet, in my mind, much as Ron paul is to the current political race, Thoof surpasses the rivals in value and quality. While this is my own perception and may not necessary be shared by everyone else, here today is something that is rather striking:

trafficcomparison.gif

See that little blue line at the bottom? That’s Thoof’s traffic compared to the older, bigger guys out there in my contest. And yet, it placed second in the contest and nearly leads in overall traffic generation for my blog.

My thoughts right now are filled with “niche” marketing and all that I’ve read recently about how powerful it can be. I think, as a first reaction today anyway, that one reason why the bigger, older, more well-trafficked sites have little benefit to me currently is that they are simply too large and too broad to have a focused impact. I’m a new, small site seeing great benefit from a fellow new, and relatively-small site. Screams “niche” to me and many-is-the-niche that’s been hugely successful by not being too broad, dilute, and unwieldly. Certain resources for certain applications……food for thought.

Want more? Here’s the post that was the content of the contest. Here’s the introduction to the contest. And here are the results. Still want more? Subscribe to my feed!

Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.


Winning, Losing, and Analyzing the Outcome of The Submission Contest.

The results are in! The contest itself was a success from my point of view: this is a very young blog and I saw a nice spike in traffic, already exceeding my stats for the whole previous month in just the first week of this one. Can’t complain about that!

firstscreenshot.jpg

In breaking those pretty numbers down, I took a look at Google Analytics, which measures traffic a little differently than my server does, but offers a better look at each page, who’s coming, and how. I was pretty surprised at the outcome; at the halfway point, thoof.com was winning by a nice margin (60%). I didn’t look at it all over the weekend; my server tells me that on Friday, the site had over 3,000 visits on that ONE day. I do indeed wish I knew what accounted for the spike; by Monday, Stumble had overtaken the lead and by Tuesday was standing as the clear and obvious winner.

googletraffic.jpg

Technically speaking, the second place winner in this graph seems to be “direct” traffic. But for the purposes of the contest, I’m only measuring the sites I submitted to. Which means:

StumbleUpon won with a traffic rate for the single post “Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Feed?” of 83% of all traffic measured by Google Analytics for that page.

Thoof.com came in second, with 5.61%

Digg and Reddit each brought in less than 1%, which makes them dismal losers.

As a new company and a new company blog, I think it’s clear which sources have the most ROI for my effort. Stumble and Thoof are both extremely user friendly; I prefer Thoof of all of them because of a few things that make it unique over it’s rivaling winner; I probably under-use Stumble; won’t be from here on out I tell ya! And likewise, I probably will use Digg and Reddit very little now.

A few things that interest me: I chose a post that had a tech-angle for this experiment because tech is Digg’s slant. I was surprised to see it do so dismally there….and also not-so-surprised because the vibe I get over there is that it’s a pretty volatile popularity contest where lots of great material can be “buried” for odd reasons. Also, Thoof

is a better performer on the whole for me (and my clients) and I wonder why the post in this experiment seems to have gone against that norm. For instance, Thoof and Stumble are nearly tied right now for the total amount of traffic brought in (will continue to monitor this and report back at the end of the month); the difference being is that Stumble spiked a high on this ONE contest post, while Thoof seems to have a longer tail and brings in more value overall. We’ll see. It’s definitely fascinating to watch.

googleselection.jpg

Images thanks to ScreenGrab; this project also gave me the impetus to learn something new!

Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.


Who’s winning the submission contest so far?

We’re at the halfway point in the Submission Contest….who’s winning?

The line up is: Thoof, Stumble, Digg, Reddit and the contrast is much more stark than I realized. I’ll the final tally and post numbers and graphed results on Tuesday (contest ends Monday).


The Submission Experiment: Which Service Brings the Most Traffic…Thoof, Digg, Stumble, or Reddit?

One service I do for my clients is to submit their posts to sites and aggregators in order to draw in more traffic. I use many but Thoof is definitely my favorite; it gets high marks from me for usability and clarity; I love that there is no comment feature leading to the snarkiness and distraction other sites can accumulate and their lay out doesn’t hurt my eyes like others. In addition, the people who run it have shown themselves to be a personable, friendly bunch who are aggressively working on their creation.

Still though, my business is traffic growth. The sites I use vary in age and size; thoof is probably the smallest and newest of the bunch. Last month when I did my month-end traffic reports I happily discovered that with thoof.com submissions, two of my sites tripled their monthly traffic! The same articles had been submitted to other sites and while they had indeed brought in traffic, thoof out performed them. This was not a very scientific process; rather a hindsight observation.

So I’ve decided to give a more controlled study a try. Yesterday I wrote a post on a fairly hot tech-topic: RSS Feeds. Near and Dear to Yours Truly is a concern over the persistence of many to cling to old-fashioned email while they rotely check blog after blog each day, fleeing from learning something new: RSS (which is increasingly not that new). All on it’s own I would expect this post to be a good traffic generator; it’s optimized well, draws the reader deeper into the blog, and also advertises my own feed. From there I submitted it to several services: Thoof.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com. I was going to include Technorati but “Doh! They’ve lost the Technorati Monster Again”, a chronic condition they really oughtta do something about.

Over the next 7 days I will measure the incoming traffic from these sites and then at the end, post the results. Full disclosure: I don’t really expect to change my behavior with the results…..I’ve given all of them an ample test drive and I know the user-strengths and weaknesses of all of them. But from a traffic standpoint, I’m highly interested to see how it turns out.

Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.


How often do you say, “I don’t know”?

I made my first business traveling trip this week. I met with a new client for dinner, meeting a new inquirer at the same time, stayed the night with an old friend and new client, and the next morning, had another meeting with yet another new client getting up close and personal with her very dynamic project. The whole thing was a ton of fun and a lot of talking and listening.

More than once I was asked a question that I didn’t immediately know the answer to. I’m resourceful and smart and know how to find the answers given time but in these settings, restaurants and away from my computer, I wasn’t in “do your homework” mode. My clients and inquirers have one steady trait: they all put a lot of thought into taking on a new endeavor such as a blog. They tease it around in their minds, ask lots of different people questions, do research, take advice, and give the idea time to ruminate. They ask GOOD, thoughtful questions. Along side this is the highly adaptive world of the internet and things are always changing and developing. What may be true today may be enhanced tomorrow. This is certainly true in the sphere of podblogging and vlogging; more is available every day both on the center stage and behind the scenes.

And so foolish is the expert who claims to know everything. Better is an honest approach. Say, “You know? I’m not sure but I know how to find out and will get back to you.” Tell them when you’ll get back to them with the information. Make no guarantees when you aren’t confident. An example of this is promising something will make your client money when you don’t fully have a grasp on the process that you both will be experimenting and learning with, as is the case with new and ground-breaking material.

Honesty breeds respect and respect breeds loyalty and trust. If you honestly don’t know, then say as much, and follow it up with what you DO know: that you can find out and serve them best with your willingness to learn more about how to meet their needs. The result is integrity which is worlds better than a facade of knowing all there is to know.

Other posts that may be helpful:

Do I Need an E-Zine?

How To Kill Your Blog.

Want to read more Blogging About Blogging from theblogsultant.com? Subscribe to my feed!

Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.


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