Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I told a new client just last week that my silly, personal posts often generate the most comments. And today I had that experience, once again. My little vacation from technology over the weekend generated a little conversation that’s been quite fun for me. And it welcomed a new resource into my world, Dawn Foster, who writes over at the FastWonder Blog.

I’d heard of Dawn from one of my clients, who mentioned she does online community consulting, and used to work for Jive Software, source of one of the major platforms for online communities.

Well, she happened to stop by my post this morning and comment on it. And (as is human nature, and why I tell my clients not to be afraid of posting little personal posts once in awhile) I had to go check out her blog.

Wow. 

What a resource. Her post last week on Maintaining A Successful Corporate Community is a fantastic example of what a great blog is about. Real information, eminently readable, and truthful advice. In a blog about topics that are fascinating to me. I’ve not yet met Dawn, but as soon as I’ve finished this post, I’m going to email her to invite her to lunch. I suspect we might have a lot in common. I know I’ll learn from her. I hope we’ll each have time to make lunch happen.

Regardless, I’m subscribed.

…she asked me, quite innocently… Apparently I do, I told her.

On Mondays, it seems, the guilt of neglecting my blog meets with the promise of a new week, and I can spring into action and post!

I’ve taught blogging for business for more than three years now, and have ALWAYS said to blog 2-3 times a week, or you’re not a serious blogger.

A Blog of Small Things

However, since my blog is my web site (it works for me); it seems appropriate for me not to post small things… I choose to wait until the energy or a good story moves me. It’s not particularly good for my Technorati ranking, but I believe it’s better for my readers.

I got an email on Sept. 11 from a colleague who forwarded a daily blog post she subscribes to, and said,

“Seth’s daily blog seems to me like a daily Fortune Cookie.  Am I missing something here?”

My response: “I think your observation is fabulous. He’s tired, and experimenting… when you’ve been blogging for years, you either do what I do, and go for spurts when you blog 2-3 times a week, and then only on Mondays… or you do what he’s doing, and dash off thoughts that look like haiku and sometimes work, most of the time, don’t.

But what’s that saying about Babe Ruth and the number of strikeouts vs. home runs he had?”

Blogging is Personal - Make it Yours

A blog - yes, even a business blog that doubles as a web site - is a personal, living, breathing thing. And when people are not inspired, writing can be uninspiring. You never know what’s going to move someone to action… to post, to comment, to reference… but poorly written, boring or uninspiring posts rarely do.

My friend Dylan posts on Sunday afternoons. He will often queue up posts for the week, and then be done. I think that’s smart. But I don’t have his discipline.

So I often blog on Mondays… it seems to work for me.

Google announced they’re expanding their search into old newspaper archives (via Reuters), and in a stunning coincidence today, United Airlines shares lost nearly all of their value.

How are these two things related, you ask?

Well, according to an article in today’s NYTimes called “United Shares Plunge on False Bankruptcy,” a false rumor started spreading this morning that United had declared bankruptcy. According to the Times, a Google search started the cascade of events…

“United said the rumor occurred when the Web site of The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, posted a six-year-old article from The Chicago Tribune archives about United’s previous bankruptcy filing. The airline operated under bankruptcy protection from 2002 through 2006….

….The outdated article received wide attention when it appeared that it was posted on Bloomberg News by a reporter for Income Securities Advisors, an investment research firm in Miami that tracks information about distressed companies.

Richard Lehmann, the founder of Income Securities, said the company’s reporter discovered the article during a routine search on Google for information about bankruptcy filings in 2008. A link to the old Chicago Tribune article appeared as the first search item, bearing a current date, not its original date, Mr. Lehmann said.

When the reporter clicked on the link, it navigated to the United Airlines article on the front page of the Sun-Sentinel Web site, next to a radar map showing the location of Hurricane Ike, Mr. Lehmann said.”

The context for the Google search certainly looked like it was “ripped from today’s headlines.” And can you imagine the confusion for United employees, wondering why their shares were halted from the NY stock exchange today amidst bankruptcy rumors?

I applaud the notion of scanning newpaper archives (quite literally scanning, in this case) so there’s no possible confusion by well-meaning researchers as to the date(s) of their results.

Meanwhile, the coincidence of the two articles appearing within moments of each other in my RSS reader was not lost here.

When asked by clients how to measure how their blog is doing, I generally run through a little series of “visibility” tests to determine how vibrant and visible their blog is. Here are my personal steps, and I’d certainly be interested in hearing how others determine a blog’s success.

I recommend running through these steps generally within two-three months of a blog launch, and then periodically (depending on your curiousity/blog strategy) after. I’ve also included recommendations to boost your blog’s visibility. Once you’ve implemented them, you should begin to see improvements in engagement, readership and visibility.

Blog Search Engines - Register, Ping Them

1) Technorati - at the most basic level in Technorati (one of the most well known and well used blog search engines), you have the opportunity to claim your blog and profile it with tags, author information, etc. (your blog categories will be automatically generated into Technorati tags).

Once your blog is active, and have people commenting about it and linking to it, your Technorati Authority Ranking will be developed. A nice side benefit will be that the press will find your bloggers even more appealing as thought leaders.

The higher your Authority Ranking, the closer you are to the “top” of the blogosphere.

A general rule of thumb for new blogs is that an authority ranking of 25 or greater is getting significant. Authority is based on the number of inbound links, and other activity (posts, comments and trackbacks) in relation to other bloggers.

Recommendation: Join and claim your blog on Technorati. Then, once you have an account, be sure to ping Technorati every time you publish a new post. Pings can be set up to happen automagically in your blog software. It’s well documented on the ping page.

2) Similarly, add your blog to IceRocket (another popular blog search engine). And be sure to ping it every time you post. (Again, there are directions on how to have this happen automagically.)

3) Ask.com has a great blog search tool, which is remarkably free of spam blogs, or splogs. It will likely pick up your blog posts before many other blog search engines do - in my experience, if I don’t see results in other engines, I’m usually gratified to go to Ask. Whew.

4) Of course, Google’s blog search engine is a gold standard, and I like Google Blog’s Advanced Search options for their clarity and ease of use. Type in some keywords you’ve been using, and see where you come up…

Other Views of Visibility

5) Compete.com is a great place to see how you compare to others in your space. With a free account, you can check out how your blog compares to four other blogs, in terms of traffic, and how it has changed in the last month/last year; what are the most popular keywords driving traffic to the site, etc. You can upgrade to a paid version that will give more metrics, but it’s a pretty nice, quick way to see how you compete.

6) Quantcast is similar, in the sense that you can see nice demographic information of a site’s visitors (they’re offering the “Internet’s first cookie to people audience estimates” white paper online). You’ll likely (unless your organization is big) need to add a snippet of code to your blog to be able to gather statistics, but they describe how to do it here.

7) AideRSS is a wonderful tool to help you easily see which posts are “hot.” You input your blog feed (right click on your blog’s RSS feed button and copy link location) and it will show you what % of your posts are Good, Great, and Best posts – based on the number of people commenting on them, tagging them, etc.

Once you get traffic coming to your blog, you’ll be able to see what kinds of posts people resonate with most. Mine are all over the board… (click on the thumbnail below for a full view)

Recommendation: Have your bloggers start a delicious account and tag each others’ posts when they are published. It’ll add to the ecosystem of chatter about your blog and keywords… Bonus points for also establishing a mag.nolia account (it’s where the tech nerds hang out), and tagging posts there.

8 - YackTrack is a fun way to see who’s commenting on a particular blog post URL – even when they’re not commenting at that URL itself - they may be chattering about the topic or the post around the web. You can also put in important keywords to see what kind of chatter is out there on a particular keyword. You should put your company’s brand names into the chatter section and see who’s talking on Twitter, other social media sites.

9) Google Links: You can see how many people link to any web site by going into Google and typing in the URL with the word “Links:” in front, e.g. links:http://www.janetleejohnson.com. A healthy system of inbound links is (just as in search engine marketing) a key to visibility and vibrancy.

10) Comments beget comments. How many people comment on your posts? I don’t get a lot of comments on many of my posts, probably because I don’t comment on others’ as often as I should. But we also need to remember 99% of people reading blogs don’t comment. So if you want people to comment on your blog posts, go to other blogs and comment on theirs. It’s human nature to be curious about who’s commenting on your posts… If you get one from someone you don’t yet know, go find out who it is, and see what they have to say.

Every comment gives you the opportunity to put an inbound link right back to your blog. If you do nothing else, do this. Creating inbound links and conversations are extremely important to the health of your blog, and to its visibility to others. Your blog will remain an island as long as you stay only on it and don’t venture out…

Nothing will engender more visibility or engagement than outreach.

I’ve not blogged enough recently. And it’s not because I haven’t wanted to, because I have… In fact, I’ve got a ton of interesting projects I’d love to talk about, but I can’t quite yet. For several clients, it’s because I’m under NDA. For others, it’s because I’m helping their businesses be more competitive, and it just doesn’t seem fair yet to share.

At the same time, I’ve felt an additional pressure when I blog to be more ’serious’ and ’scintillating’ since my posts are being distributed over on the Content Management Connection blog. Once you’re syndicated, it seems the pressure to perform is ratcheted up.

Sometimes, adding value to the online conversation is just plain hard. Especially when I’m not particularly funny or edgy or whimsical, even on a good day! (I’ve found plenty of great bloggers default to some innate trait to help them out of a void.)

So I feel as if this blog post is a bit akin an old Seinfeld episode… a post about nothing. Except to admit (and that’s exactly the point) that sometimes it’s hard to participate in the blogosphere… Or the Twittersphere… and be “on” all the time.

But confession is good for the soul, the sun is pouring through the windows here in Portland, and I live a dream life. I’ll be inspired all day, I just know it. And I hope to add value again by sharing some of that inspiration. Meanwhile, the muse awaits…