Understanding the starting point

To map a path, you not only must know where you want to end up, you have to know where you are. In fact, you really don’t need to know your final destination — it’s fine to say “let’s get to sweden, and then we can figure out where Stockholm is, and once we get there, we can find the hotel”. But if you map your route by starting at the wrong place, you’re screwed.

I’ve been spending time studying the analytics of my existing environment and trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t, why I like and what I don’t. It was about a year ago I decided to move from typepad back to wordpress and consolidate my presence on one blog on chuqui.com (I actually made the move in January). Overall, I think that worked very well; I like the platform and I like the technologies involved. I used an off the shelf wordpress theme that I feel worked fine in the interim with limited tweaking, and I can’t complain.

The numbers on the blog are decent. Since shifting from Typepad to WordPress, feed subscriptions have grown from about 425 to 650 (+35%). 16,000 different people visited in 2009 (so far), a number I find fascinating. Traffic is split 40% referral from other sites (including clicks from twitter postings), 40% direct (primarily RSS feeds) and 20% search engine. The search engine number is too low, but I haven’t done any significant optimization for SEO.

An interesting tidbit is that 45% of the pages published get no (zero, none, nada) viewings; if you factor out pages published in 2009 and generating views based on RSS/Twitter, it’s more like 70%.

A typical posting has about a two week lifetime where it’ll get views based on being in your RSS feed or posted to twitter/facebook; after that, unless it’s got prominent visibility on the site, gets traffic from links from other blogs or search engines, it no longer exists.

In other words, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) matters, especially if you want to avoid having to constantly throw traffic out onto the RSS feed to drive views. At the same time, if you aren’t updating on a regular basis, you’re going to disappear.

My adsense advertising made me about $0.75 this year. I haven’t done any work to try to maximize this — it was literally a put-there-and-watch test — but that’s really pitiful. Part of that, I think, is that Adsense seems to work better in a non-geek audience; if your audience lives within the tech-geek echo chamber, Adsense might as well not exist. it is certainly not a panacea; hell, if anyone still thinks there’s a magic cookie where you put up a blog and money rolls in, they deserve what they get.

On the other hand, my limited (very, VERY limited) tests using Amazon affiliate links netted about $40. That won’t pay the rent, but it will buy the occasional photography book (which I can review and generate affiliate links, which…); and since it’s literally a free option for readers, there’s little downside.

About 40% of my total pageviews are to the front page (http://www.chuqui.com); I’m not entirely clear why. Adsense revenue generated by the front page: $0.00. Talk about a waste of real estate.

Most popular content: all over the place.  No real trends, which is probably good, because if my hockey writing was clearly my most popular material, that’d be bad for business.

Over on twitter, I’ve passed 1,000 followers, which just stuns me. That’s double (or more) what it was six months ago.My flickr viewing stream has a solid, regular pattern, and in fact has better SEO than my blog does — more on that later, and that’s not a bad thing, it just needs to be understood (and it can be leveraged).

My interpretations of this?

“Just posting” isn’t enough for what you publish to have an audience. The good news is that the blog format encourages conversation and allows for a less structured writing style. The negative is that if that’s all you do, most of the words or pictures will get seen for a short period of time and then effectively go away.

There are options to mitigate that. On a technical level, SEO techniques help improve visibility through the search engines. Good site design can help make content accessible to a user who visits the site, but the blunt reality is that people who visit the site don’t explore; they read what they came to see and leave. you can reduce that with careful planning of your home page and your posting-detail page, but still, expect “stick around and enjoy your stay” to be a tough sell.

I’ve decided that one way around this is repackaging. Tidbits does interesting work with their e-books, and I’ve been watching David duChemin‘s experiments with fascination, and I think this is a very interesting technique to explore. Content creation via the blog, which allows you to explore a topic in depth and over time, in a conversational and non-linear style, and then pull that content back together into an e-book where you can structure it and polish it and then publish it in HTML and/or PDF and then feature that publication on the blog entries where the content came from. The “typical” user won’t wander the blog to read the entire thread of postings, but I think if they find the content via search or from a link from another site, and the page they land on has it available as an extended article — that I think is a workable distribution for longer and more complex material.

It makes it easy for the viewer. If you make it complicated, they won’t. And you get a bit of the best of both worlds, the informality and interactivity of the blog format, and the formal “published” format for easy distribution — and for someone to come and grab later if they’re not part of the immediate conversation.

And since it is now in a tangible (albeit e-published) format, I think it is easier to make an argument that it has some value, which if you want to convince someone to exchant something of value for it, can’t hurt.

And it can be made to work with both text AND images, and adapts well for creative commons rights usage. You can get paid via an ecommerce solution as well as a donation model, depending on what you want to do, or even give it away and use sponsorship or advertising models if you want.

And that seems to be the starting point for the whole shebang, no?

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