How One Post Quintupled My Blog Visitors

by Ari Herzog on January 5, 2009 · 6 comments

NumbersI don’t obsess over metrics. But I enjoy comparing numbers now and then in relation to certain events.

Responding to Loic Le Meur and his traffic sources for last month, I’d like to share with you this blog’s sources for the period of November 27, 2008 to January 4, 2009:

  1. google.com (organic) - 10,486 visits
  2. direct (browser bookmarks, etc) - 3,092 visits
  3. twitter.com - 1,822 visits
  4. yahoo.com (organic) - 1,740 visits
  5. stumbleupon.com (referral) - 1,263 visits
  6. facebook.com (referral) -1, 146 visits
  7. msn search - 387 visits
  8. live search - 349 visits
  9. answers.yahoo.com - 323 visits
  10. google.com (referral) - 314 visits

Seen in a vacuum, these numbers may not mean anything. But they do, especially when you consider I rarely receive significant visits from Facebook, let alone answers.yahoo.com.

If you scroll back to my five-week-old article of tips on how I use Google Analytics to track aggregate data of website visitors, referral sources, browsers and operating systems used, etc., you will note I included data from a three-month period:

  • 11,430 visitors
  • 20,391 page views
  • 1.44 average time per page view
  • 1:09 average time on site
  • 75.4% bounce rate
  • 80.4% new visits

Now look at the last four weeks:

  • 21,685 visitors
  • 32,844 page views
  • 1.36 average time per page view
  • 0:57 average time on site
  • 81.7% bounce rate
  • 88.8% new visits

Here’s a graph of that December traffic (using Quantcast, another tool I recently started using):

Web traffic

Do you want to guess what caused the mountain?

On December 21, I wrote an article about a series of Facebook phishing scams, that at the time, had zero online references. My post now has 69 comments, with new ones appearing every other day.

While you spend an average 60 seconds reading my blog content (typically because you read one post and rarely click into multiple posts), every visitor to the Facebook scam page spent three minutes reading!

Like the cycle of news, blog content comes and goes. But if you write something at the right time, visitors will come. You don’t have to be an A-list blogger; you can be anyone. Just write it and capture the noise. Provide possible solutions. Offer a way for people to ask questions, whether by blog comment, email, or Facebook message (and I received all three).

If you do it right, something will go viral as that Facebook post did.

Enough people told each other, that they came and posted their thanks. Those comments don’t belong to bloggers, either. There are few blog links attached to their names. Most of their comments are attached to random email addresses on yahoo and hotmail. The bulk of those commenters were Facebook users–but if I have anything to say about it, they will become future bloggers.

Photo credit: _federico_

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My Top 10 Strategies on Social Networking

by Ari Herzog on January 5, 2009 · 2 comments

Moments after installing the Popularity Contest plugin for Wordpress (original code by Alex King, amended by Rick Beckman), I hunted.

The plugin shows the most popular posts according to comments, pageviews, categories, and other blog metrics. I was curious about my social networking category.

The ranking is in order from most popular to least popular, as of the time this post was published.

Here you go, folks. My top 10 strategies on social networking:

  1. Beware Facebook Wall Messages About SinkStumble.com
  2. 8 Free eBooks on Twitter
  3. How @Replies Work on Twitter (and Why It’s Stupid)
  4. Why I Decided to Follow My First 25 on Twitter
  5. Smiling on LinkedIn
  6. Why My Face is On My Business Card
  7. Why I Don’t Want to Be Added to Your LinkedIn Network (and What I Do Want)
  8. Twitemperature Checks Twitter Relevancy
  9. Key Quotes on New Marketing and Social Media
  10. How Employers are Hiring Online

I have my own thoughts on the above, but I see why they are there in the order listed.

For every click, comment, or inbound link you choose to make on any blog, popularity fluctuates. It gives a whole new meaning to the next blog post you read, eh?

Photo credit: minxlj

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Why I’d Like You to De-Lurk

by Ari Herzog on January 3, 2009 · 41 comments

De-Lurking Day

If you are reading this and have never commented on AriWriter, this blog post is for you.

Over the past week, Chris Brogan, Daniel Scocco, and Marko Saric shared tips on increasing blog comments.

There is another way: Pay homage to your lurkers.

That’s you.

Veerle Pieters borrowed the idea from others, describing De-Lurking Day as a special day “celebrating lurkers and exhorting you to muster the strength and bravery to click on that comment button and end the deafening silence.”

I read hundreds of blogs every week. Some are by title alone, others are by the first paragraph, but many include the entire content which sparks me to add a comment.

In recent days, I added comments to a diverse selection of blog posts, including:

If you choose to add a comment below, don’t think of it as a favor to me but as a favor to everyone else. See, as much as I enjoy reading a comment, I can assure you many comments are added just because other comments preceded them.

In this vein, if you choose to de-lurk, here’s what to do:

  1. Whether you are reading this in a feed reader, an email message, or a syndicated blog post somewhere, click here to visit the actual post.
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and follow the directions to add a comment.
  3. Type in your real name so I and others know who you are.
  4. Type in your email address so I can email you privately, thanking you for de-lurking.
  5. Type in your blog address, or your corporate website, or maybe your Facebook page. Somewhere where I and others can click your name (your web link will be linked to your name) and read more about you.
  6. Type in your Twitter id, if you have one.
  7. Type in whatever text you want, e.g. how long you’ve been reading, where you live in the world, what you do for a living, etc. Pretend we met at a bookstore and you’re introducing yourself to the world.
  8. If you want to read subsequent comments of other people, you need to check the applicable box under the text box to receive emailed updates. I click this box on every blog I comment on.

Please don’t be shy. Care to de-lurk now?

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Will I Smile at Your Taxi?

by Ari Herzog on January 2, 2009 · 9 comments

When every taxi looks the same, I smile at this one in Singapore.

Are you challenging the status quo? How are you embracing uniqueness by setting yourself apart from your competition? Any tips you care to share?

Photo credit: Richard Pluck

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Closing 2008 With Thanks

by Ari Herzog on December 31, 2008 · 28 comments

Thank YouWith about eight hours remaining in 2008 (in my part of the world, anyway), I’d like to devote my 517th blog post of the year to you.

There are somewhere between 75 to 100 million blogs in the world and I’m grateful that you’ve taken the time to read mine along with the rest.

Thank you for reading.

I hope I was able to impart some advice, tips, and/or strategies to succeed in social media and online marketing.

I also add a special thanks to everyone who commented this year.

At a time when several hundred people subscribe to my blog by RSS reader or email, it takes a combination of inspiration and manual labor to click a link or two and add a comment.

I love comments! I love adding comments to other people’s blogs and I love seeing them on mine.

Thank you to the following people who added a comment in December:

Connie Bensen, Craig Kessler, Krishna Reddy, Rich Tucker, Kim Kobza, Steve Kayser, Mike Nichols, Brandon Cox, Micah Wittman, Corey Freeman, Stuart Foster, Matthew Mamet, Matthew Diehl, Jim Connolly, Andy Bailey, Sarah Dillon, Farhan Rehman, Josh Fialkoff, Kim Woodbridge, Rachel Levy, Susan Greene, Adriel Hampton, John Cass, Andrew Nystrom, Sylvia Martinez, Jaculynn Peterson, Helen Hoefele, Lee of ScamTypes, Andrew Charlton, Debbie James, David Tonen, Ricardo Bueno, Nick Lucido, Mike Seidle, Lord Matt, B. Durant, Danny Brown, Carl Morris, Jen Wilbur, Beth Kanter, Mark Juleen, Warren Sukernek, Harry Gold, Kimberlee Ferrell, Barb Chamberlain, Thomas Slatin, Ray Montero, Rich Sands, Vicki Brown, Max Gladwell, Anthony Farrior, David Meerman Scott, David Mullen, Sonny Gill, Monica Hamburg, Veronica Sopher, Gavin Heaton, Anita Bruzzese, Amber Naslund, Kimberly Bock, Jon Lansner, Dave Atkins, Karlos Schmieder, Emma Dozier, Tom Volkar, Gib Wallis, Melanie Hall, Jillian York, Debbie James, Deanna Keahey, Thao Ly, Apolinaras Sinkevicius, Christina Carlson, Adam Cohen, Joe Baz, Marc Meyer, LJ Jones, Marita Roebkes, Meghan Harvey, Todd Van Hoosear, Kami Huyse, Ryan Miller, Steve Evans, Jason Alba, Kristi Kikolani, Rajeev Edmonds,Shannon Whitley, Jay Radford, Stevie Wilson, Teresa Wu, David Bradley, Matt Pellerin, Susan Smith, Jim Lee, Mark Juleen, Alexandra Rampy, Charlene Engeron, Matt Hayden, Mark Evans, Gregory Kohs, David Gerard, Wendy Huffman, Geoff Girardin, Kathleen Couch, Amber Salmon, Andrea Baker, Greg Staker, George “Loki” Williams, Mark Dykeman, Jay Thompson, Kimmie Nguyen, Jim Benson, Jannie Funster, Duncan Alney, Andrew Krzmarzick, Richard Becker, Vardis Fisher, Chris Drinkut, Sean Colahan, Glen Turpin, Sherry Dedman, Heather Poirier, Gail Konop Baker, Rick Littrell, Jeffrey Levy, Mason Wong, Adam Snider, Rachel Kay, Judy Rey Wasserman,  Heather Rast, Carlos Granier-Phelps, Heidi Cool, Heather McConnell, Mitch Joel, Shaun Dakin, Aram Zucker-Scharff, Sylwia Presley, Noelle Mena, Jim Winslow, John Haydon, Shelley Bernstein, Tim Laubacher, John Eckman, Shama Hyder, Victor Samra, Vicky Harres Akers, Mark Cahill, Julie Roads, Deneil Merritt, Nicole Simon, Harold Campbell,  Stephanie Kieras, Jenn Castro, Rick Fisk, Scott Kaufman, Caleb Gardner, Sheila Langston, Ed Bennett, Ledo Fonseca, Yael Beeri, Adam Roades, Alka Shakya, Karen Carnes, and anyone else I may have missed!

You may have noticed that I recently set up a “Chat Catcher” script that displays a comment every time a blog post is referenced in a Twitter message. For this, special thanks to Shannon Whitley.

The new year will bring many additions to this blog, including a foray into corporate brand research and how companies are creatively using the internet, more additions to the recent series of best practices in social media, and video blogging. Stay tuned, keep reading, and if you choose, continue to comment.

Happy New Year!

Photo credit: jaredchapman

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How New Tools Help Reach New Audiences

by Ari Herzog on December 30, 2008 · 1 comment

Do you remember March 2007 when Maxim Magazine arrived in Israel for a five-day photo shoot of former Israel Army soldiers clad in bikinis?

In the words of Arye Mekel, former Consul General of Israel in New York, the country asked the magazine to do the shoot as a means of enhancing their public image.

The public face for the Israeli Consulate–then–and now is David Saranga, the consul for media and public affairs.

Saranga’s latest media circus–carried by everyone from the Jerusalem Post to YNetNews to Global Voices Online to KABOBfest–marked the debut of a “citizen press conference” in a unique way.

In the words of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, which blogged a historic first:

JTA blog post

“Welcome to all of our new followers! Please stay tuned for more soon as we get settled on Twitter,” read the debut tweet at 12:54 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 29, 2008 by @IsraelConsulate.

By the time the press conference began, some 24 hours later, @IsraelConsulate was following 1,159 Twitter users and had 1,348 followers.

Three hours later, at 4:30 p.m., I saw it followed 1,163 and was followed by 1,885.

Now, at 8 p.m., it’s following 1,635 and is followed by 2,104.

Wanna guess the numbers in the morning? It’s fair to say they’ve settled.

Ars Technica’s David Chartier opined in the hours preceding the conference:

Opening the doors this wide to a global audience could very well overwhelm the Consulate’s team with questions, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Twitter’s focus on absolute simplicity may also make some Q&A conversations difficult to follow.

Indeed.

Here’s what Australian tweeter @jinjirrie wrote on her blog about the conversations:

Though one couldn’t say real twittering rapport was achieved, the flood of questions from round the planet kept the Consul’s fingers hopping! Twitter is probably not the best medium to conduct open press conferences that are likely to attract large numbers of participants.

Ohio tweeter @jillmz suggested CoverItLive be used in the future.

I couldn’t agree more. CoverItLive is a live blogging application which I plan to use more, personally, in 2009, to help cover live events. For instance, I assisted Jillian York, Ange Embuldeniya, and others in an Election Night live blogging exercise on behalf of Voices without Votes.

While the world waits to see what Saranga and his new media team will do next, you can peruse through the global questions asked about the Gaza situation; and follow the Consulate’s four-part series of “citizen press” responses.

Saranga explains why the responses look different on israelpolitik.org than on Twitter:

The conversations were ‘expanded’ (meaning we removed the short ‘twitter talk’ and re-wrote fully spelled words) but otherwise unchanged.

By means of example, here’s a typical response Saranga tweeted during the two-hour event to Virginia resident Tom Wyld:

Twitter message from Israeli Consulate

And here’s the expanded version:

The Dignity didn’t respond to calls to halt and rammed an IDF ship. It was escorted out to international waters. Until this operation, ships were let in; they are not let in now to keep them from harm.

If answers were written out on Twitter, it would be unnecessary to take man-hours and re-write everything. Not to mention, Twitter messages are indexed by search engines and so if someone is searching for a keyword, she may find the Twitter message without any understanding of context.

I hope Saranga and his team keep up their Twitter appearances. I hope this “citizen press conference” is the start of a long-term presence of responding to queries online.

In the meantime, feel free to visit the Israel Defense Force’s YouTube channel, also launched yesterday, and now live with 10 videos. Last I checked, the videos amassed over 70,000 views.

Maxim and magazines were the start. Who knows where it’s going, but I like it so far.

Any guesses on the next country to emulate Israel and use new media for a communication channel?

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