Are your blog post comments scattered?

As bloggers, we try to make use of all the cross-promotional tools we can to try to drive traffic to our blog posts. Particularly with venues like Facebook and Twitter, where people can also comment on what you’ve written, it’s easy for comments about a post to end up scattered across  several different places.

So the question becomes: Is it important to try to gather all the comments into one place for the most complete discussion?

When I first noticed this occurring with some of my posts I had shared on Facebook, I worried that the comments there would not become part of the “record” of the original post.

But I soon realized that it’s beneficial to have a trail back to the original post from several different venues because it gives you more “lines in the water” for reeling in new readers.

That said, I do think you can further manage your scattered comments for the benefit of your blog. Here’s a strategy that will help bring the conversation back to the blog, but still acknowledge and promote the responses on other venues. It will also help you get more “mileage” out of the original post, while contributing something new.

Take a quick look back at the responses you got on Twitter, or Facebook, or wherever, and write a follow-up post about them.

• If any of them asked a particularly good question, answer it in a new post inter-linked back to the original.
• If they were all just “nice post”-type comments, think of something you personally can add to the post and lead into it by saying, “My post on (x) received some very positive feedback over on Twitter, so I wanted to follow up with (xx).”
• Be sure to include your user ID on the other relevant service(s) within your post so blog readers can find/follow you there.

Use this strategy to showcase all the conversations taking place around your blog post.

photo from the Flickr stream of Jungle_boy

Basic blog traffic and metrics, and the impact on search engine results

When I first began journal blogging in 2002, I wasn’t really thinking about an audience other than myself. Still, the first time I put up a really good piece of writing, I did have the fleeting thought that it would be nice if someone else would read it. I soon became very curious about how many people were finding my site, and that curiosity quickly became a bit of an obsession.

There are several free methods you can use to gather site metrics. Sitemeter can give you some basics; if you blog using WordPress, the WP Stats plugin is a good option. If you are far enough along that you have an account through a web hosting provider and you run WordPress in this environment, you can install Google Analytics for a thorough look at your stats. My web host has a decent traffic reporting system, so I mostly use that plus Feedburner (mentioned below). I also use a blog tracking community called MyBlogLog - it’s basic service is free, and there’s a paid enhanced version that might be worthwhile if your traffic-counting needs become serious.

Here are some key items to look at when reviewing your stats:

1. Number of visits per month (not “hits”) – if one person comes to the blog, that’s one visit no matter how many posts they read.  While some folks make a distinction between “unique visitors” (uniques) and returning visitors, I don’t see where it makes much difference whether they’ve been there before. If somebody’s reading on Monday morning and they come back Monday night, to me that’s just as good as if it was two different people.

2. Number of page-views per month – If 100 people come to the site, that’s 100 visits. If they each read 5 pages while they’re there, that 500 page views.  Visits, then, tell you the number of people coming to the site; page views tell you something about how much of your content they’re reading while they’re there.

3. Whether visits and page-views are going up or down each month. Even a small tick upward each month is an indication that your posts are being indexed by the search engines and that people are searching for the topics you’re writing about.

4. What search phrases people are using to reach your blog. Knowing what phrases people are using when they find your blog can be not only a boon if you want to plan ways to get more traffic around those phrases; it can also help you generate ideas for future posts. On my ”biker chick” blog, one of the phrases I see with some frequency is “sportster ape hangers,” which refers to “ape hanger” handlebars on a Sportster motorcycle. I happen to have ape hangers on my Sportster, and mentioned them in one of my posts. I could certainly write a detailed follow-up post about how and why I put those handlebars on my bike, and get some traffic from people who obviously want to know something about it.

5. What percentage of readers are “bouncing”? If your site has a high bounce rate, people are coming in but leaving right away. This wouldn’t concern you if you’re only writing for yourself, but it’s critical knowledge if you are trying to attract an audience around a particular search phrase because it suggests that although they are finding your site, they aren’t seeing what they want once they get there.

6. Which are your most- and least-popular posts? Even from a purely personal standpoint, it’s nice to know which posts are getting the most traffic. If you’re trying to build an audience, you can get an idea for which topics people are most interested in and write more about them, thereby improving your search engine rankings for those topics.

7. How many subscribers you have to your RSS Feed or via email. Chances are, your blog automatically publishes an RSS feed. Visitors to your site can subscribe to your feed through a feed reader such as Bloglines or Google Reader, or they can subscribe to updates via email. In either case, this delivers your latest blog content directly to them without them having to return time and again to your site. (More on this in a future post.) Enhance your feed by running it through Google’s FeedBurner service, and you can tell not only how many people subscribe to your feed but you can employ a variety of ways to promote your feed. (“Subscribers” is one of those addictive measurements that many bloggers check daily – or multiple times daily, especially if they know they have a current popular post.)

Understanding your blog’s basic metrics is not only interesting (and addictive), it’s critical if you want to use the information to develop new and better content, deliver advertising messages to your audience, or understand how people are finding your site.