This is a guest post by Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogger at QuickSprout.com. He also does consulting work for a number of major Internet properties, including TechCrunch.
When you think about growing your blog, whether it is a personal, professional or company blog, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Chances are it is something related to traffic or subscribers. Getting more traffic or subscribers is never a bad thing, but if you really want more sustainable traffic you first have to understand the people coming to your blog. If you can’t make them happy, how can you expect your traffic to grow?
Stop Assuming!
You have a vision of how you see your blog and where you want it to go. The reality is that your vision may not match up with what your readers are expecting. So instead of assuming things about your readers, start getting feedback from them.
- Feedback – Through services like Skribit your readers and customers can provide post suggestions. The feedback is posted publicly and other readers can vote on it whether they agree or disagree.
- Polls – Polling services like Poll Daddy can allow you to figure out what direction you should take your content. For example, if you have some ideas for your blog, you can create a poll and have your reader’s vote on which ideas they would like to read more about.
- Reader surveys – No matter how small or large your reader base is, you can survey them. Eric Ries, who is a big advocate of customer development, started surveying his readers when he only had 5 RSS subscribers. He asked them the following things right within his blog post:
- On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is most likely), how likely is it that you would recommend this blog to a friend or colleague?
- How did you hear about it?
- What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (Or, if you’re not a subscriber, what would it take to convince you?)
- What do you hope to see here in the future?
As shown above, there are many ways to get feedback from readers. Another example of getting feedback was when Michael Arrington first started TechCrunch. He began having meet ups at his house just months after starting the blog. The face-to-face feedback that he must have received proved to be valuable and effective in helping TechCrunch grow. As a result, the content on TechCrunch, which started with primarily basic company profiles, has also been expanded on and improved from there.
Track, Analyze, and Execute!
Analytics solutions like Google Analytics, Feedburner, and Lijit are great, but what’s the point of having them if you aren’t really using them? You probably log into your Google Analytics account every once in a while and look to see if your traffic is up or down, but do you ever get down into the nitty-gritty details to try and understand your readers? Do you know what changes you need to make to increase your readership and engagement levels?
- Traffic sources – analyzing the traffic sources that are bringing you visitors, such as referring sites and search engine keywords can help you understand the type of people visiting your blog. If most of your traffic is coming from tech blogs, it is likely that your readers are somewhat sophisticated, which means if you geek out you may win some brownie points with them. On the other hand if you notice that most of your readers are coming from celebrity blogs or other types of non-tech sites, you probably don’t want to get too technical with your content because they may not understand what you are talking about. Additionally, with the rise of Twitter clients, URL shortening services are becoming increasingly popular, so it is important to understand how this affects your analytics and referral traffic. Referral traffic can also help you identify conversations related to your blog occurring on social media sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook and even forums.
- Visitor loyalty – Metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, and percentage of return visitors should give you a sense of how loyal your visitors are. You will never be able to please all of your visitors, but you should be able to please a good percentage. Dig deep and see what’s causing your high bounce rate and try to improve it.
- Internal search data – Services like Lijit and Google Analytics Site Search do a great job of tracking your internal search data. If you have a search box on your blog, they can track the number of searches per day and what keywords your users are searching for. This should help you understand what they are looking for and what you need to provide to these readers.
- Geographical data – Looking at your geographical data may actually shock you. Although most your traffic may come from the U.S you should drill down to see what worldwide cities bring you the most traffic. For me it is a few major cities in India and London. Analyzing this data helps you understand the background of your readers and what you should or shouldn’t write to grow your readership. Remember, language and religion play a big role in many people’s lives.
- RSS subscribers – Feedburner doesn’t just show you how many RSS subscribers you have, it also gives you data on what your RSS readers like and dislike reading. You can look at data such as click through rates on specific stories. This will help validate what you thought the most popular stories were. In most cases the stories that you thought were your best, aren’t your readers’ favorites. Feedburner also lets you track things like when people unsubscribe to your feed. This is a great feature because if you notice tons of people unsubscribing at once, you can try to understand why and adjust accordingly.
After you analyze the data provided by your web analytics solutions you need to take action. Whether it’s modifying your design to decrease your bounce rate or figuring out what new content topics you should be writing after looking through your Feedburner/Lijit stats, you have to take action. If you don’t, you shouldn’t even waste time tracking your stats.
Engage, Engage, and Engage!
Blogging is a two way street, you can’t expect to understand your readers if you don’t interact with them. Polls, surveys, and feedback tools are great, but that is only half the battle when it comes to engagement. Here are few ways you can engage with your audience:
1. Respond to every email – Gary Vaynerchuck spends most of his time responding to every email he gets. Just try sending him an email… he may be a bit delayed in responding to you, but no matter what, he will respond. This is the main reason he has been able to build a strong brand and a popular blog because he takes the time to listen and respond to every person that emails him.
2. Respond to every commenter – every time someone comments on your blog, you should respond to him or her. How do you expect to create a conversation and a community if people are just talking to themselves? This is a time consuming process, but if you want to develop a relationship with your customers, there is no better way. You can even use comment systems such as IntenseDebate and Disqus to help improve commenting on your blog.
3. Leverage your competition – just because someone isn’t reading your blog, doesn’t mean you can’t get to him or her. Start reading other blogs in your industry and all of your competitors’ blogs and comment on every one of their posts. Respond to the comments and win over readers.
Conclusion
If you want to grow your blog, you need to first understand your readers. Without understanding your audience you won’t know what they like and dislike. Take the next few hours and start analyzing your blog and create a game plan on how you can grow your blog. If you find yourself getting stuck, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out. J
Lastly if you want to learn more about customer development, I highly recommend that you check out Steve Blank’s blog, he pioneered the concept of customer development and even wrote a book on it.
Great Article for new bloggers like me.
Thanks!
Lots of good information Neil, easy to read and to the point.
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
hi neil
im in real estate and find it difficult and sometimes boring as none of my customers send any feedback after i blog.
is there a way where i can pay $10-$15 per month for 4 topic based blogs of my local market choice?
if you know of insource outsource option let me know
Great post, but how does a small-time blogger find the time to do all of this?
You don’t have to do everything on the list, I would start off by doing a few things. As your blog grows you can then put in more time into it.
a good domain name is also a great place to start. TC is a great example.
TC dont have polls or surveys.
VisitorLocator.com – got engagement?
Thank you fr this post. I will follow the keen advice.
Great post thanks for the advice. I do have one question though. Who would be an audience for a personal blog? I talk about only a few things – my thoughts on marketing/business, sports, and occasionally events in my life. The only traffic I get is when announcing a new post on twitter or when I’ve interviewed for a job and they check out my blog. I know I just need to keep posting, consistently. But I don’t know how to grow my readers.
YOU need to know what’s your audience and where to find it.
What’s your portfolio? Why people should listen to what you have to say? Tell people what you do and why people should follow you. Share you knowledge, your passion … give something back. What you want to achieve with that blog?
For starts, get a domain name. That’s what I think …
You got it right. You only have a few seconds to convert a visitor into a reader. So you better have a clear value proposition.
Hey Neil, you impress with both technical skill and common sense!
Dan
Anyone could be a reader. Keep in mind that they could be a business person, marketer or even a sports fanatic. Readers don’t have to read every post, instead just the ones that are related to them.
I would consider trying to post a survey on your blog to get more insights on your readers. After you do that, it will be much easier to figure out how to grow your reader base.
Thanks for the article. Will help so much when I get my degree and start my business.
Neil,
Great post! I think that there is an interesting evolution of bloggers. First, we start writing, usually not often, but around topics that we find interesting.
Then we get our first comment from some we dont know. All of a sudden, we are bloggers!
Then is becomes so important to understand what your readers want from you. Your points are right on. Ask what people want to hear from you.
At Lijit, one of the stats we track is searches that return no results. Imagine learning that writers are searching for a topic that you have never written about! Certainly, that would give you some insight into what you could write about.
Engagement is probably the most overlooked tactic of growing a blog. Dont just write and wait for people to show up, engaging people outside of your blog in the communities that interest you will allow your influence and traffic to grow.
Fantastic post, Neil. But, what else can one expect from you?
(BTW, Steve’s blog is a cant miss. Nice call on that.)
I am not sure. Probably KISSmetrics.
Absolutely true. I put together half the blog I link to here by writing articles around online searches on topics that I didn’t cover at all, and more interestingly, searches on sub-topics of topics that I already covered. I loved checking out searches in my stats and seeing who searched for what, when, what they found, how many searchers searched for the same thing and how often such searches occurred. I maintained a minimum of 3-5 people searching on the same topic or sub-topic per week before I’d consider covering it, unless the one or two searches on a missing topic were so brilliant and/or obvious that I’d say to myself, “Hey, self, why didn’t I cover that before?” Unfortunately, with most of my blog already written I don’t look too deeply into the search logs anymore (I think I’ve done nearly everything I can do with most of my categories) . It never occurred to me to directly poll and survey my readers as well, but I think that’s a great idea, as well, now that Neal has suggested it.
good tips for people starting out, but not much depth
Agreed, this article seriously lacks depth. Surely the author has more specific insights…
Neil, as usual, your post is filled with insightful tips and links to great analytic tools as well as some other great experts. Great stuff and kudos!
Responding to people is an important one, but what can you do when there are just too many people trying to get in touch with you? I can’t even imagine how many emails TC gets every day.
I would hire someone to do it. Look at Gary Vaynerchuck, he spends most of his time responding to emails.
Neil Patel is bomb ass, good tips!
Excellent post. I always learn something from every article by Neil.
P.U.B., Publishers Union of Bloggers, have a solvency watch on Lijit pending release of its guidance moving forward, requested several months ago by P.U.B.
If you use Lijit, have a backup concurrent visible (or invisible) search option running on your blog from either a publicly traded company or an entity transparent with guidance, should Lijit fail.
Thanks for the post,
Barney
P.U.B.
Great info. The post was relevant and informative.
Your post is very informative and highly rich in content.
Great insights and advice! Thanks Neil
- Rant
http://www.rantbastard.com
Hi
nice post its really help me
A nice article and I presume a lot of it should also apply to start-ups.
I posted a comment but don’t see it.
I really enjoyed this post and hope TechCrunch will have more like it in the future.
I definitely think this is great info for anyone starting a site/blog.
I recently started one at http://www.socialnerdia.com. When you are starting you have to focus on understanding your potential audience (and seeking it) without coming off as annoying or self-promoting. There’s not much analytics to do at first, and certainly not much engaging with non-existing visitors so focusing on engaging in other places, creating good content, setting a solid foundation and appealing design, and ultimately not assuming things (seeking feedback instead) will help.
I’m only getting started and would appreciate anyone’s word of advice (either at Social Nerdia or via email at socialnerdia@gmail.com).
Hi Neil!
Big fan here, thanks for the great suggestions on getting in the heads of your visitors.
I’m about to start a new blog, and i’m wondering – if you could list ONLY ONE THING – the most essential number one thing for someone to keep in mind when starting a new blog which you could write a whole series of articles on – what is it and how do you do it?
Thanks,
Satya
For me it is comments because that measures engagement. What I do is take a look at my traffic stats and Feedburner subscriber number and divide it by the number of comments on my blog. The higher my comment to visitor ratio, the happier I am.
OK – THANKS – great reference point (maybe to some people it’s obvious, but i’m trying to cultivate the zen “beginner’s mind”) – that being said –
WHAT IS THE NUMBER ONE WAY TO GENERATE COMMENTS???
i know – good content and lots of traffic , right?
please tell us something new NEIL! : ) – any formula for making KILLER CONTENT – or is it targeting the people that MAKE COMMENTS?
any insight on this would be AWESOME i think for all your readers on this particular subject- thanks again – cheers!
Satya
When you are writing content, don’t concentrate on the news or hot stories. There are already tons of blogs that do this. Write content that is ever lasting and that people can read a year from now and still gain value from. Over time, this will lead to more comments per blog post.
Also create a conversation with your blog posts. For example at the end of each blog post you can try to phase a question, this usually helps with engagement.
And lastly, your blog posts should always be one sided. If you create wishy washy content instead of sticking to one side, it creates a lot less comments. Remember, controversy is good. You never want to say everything in your blog posts or else you won’t leave any room for comments.
Great advice, thanks
Mutimba
Good summary Niel – indeed very much useful tips from personal bloggers to corporate cloggers
.
That’s a great tip. I am sometimes tempted to blog on almost about anything. I pays to know who your readers are =)
nice thinking and very concise and to the point presentation. Very helpful for new bloggers like us.
Great tips. Customer development is usually difficult for newbies. This really helps you understand some things to get you started.
First sorry about my englis
I liked the post, is a very selfish and only publishes what is an interest, but after this article, should decide if I write only for my (personal journal), or write to my subscribers (blog) post in my blog a translation of his article to Spanish, I hope it serves my limited readership 24 = D
Why not do both. Once one of them takes off, transition most of your time to that one.
This post is very light on insight, especially when you consider how long it is. Surveys? Web analytics? I love how you present these things like they’re something new.
agreed
That was an excellent post and got me thinking about some mistakes I’m making and got my creative juices flowing with how I can improve this aspect of my blogging.
Thanks so much!
These tips are great. But readers are shallow in that they post feedback(s) mostly on high traffic blogs and media outlets to get back links.
I read tens of well written blogs and at times with more substance than any of the well known, with absolutely no feedback or comments.
It is less about what makes a reader happy as it is more about how much traffic your blog generates.
There are exceptions. Sure! Try to be one. Talk is cheap. Make it happen and then talk. Cool sounding tips does not necessarily work. No matter how diligently and hard you work on them.
In many cases those blogs aren’t inviting a conversation. You can have great content, but you need to invite a conversation if you want engagement.
Excellent – I enjoyed your article on analysing Feedburner data, too.
My question: Why does Feedburner only keep track of and let you manage folks who subscribe via email? Surely it isn’t too difficult to collect a user’s data when they subscribe via RSS, too?
I have a Wordpress plugin that pulls an enormous amount of social media data from anyone who posts a comment on my blog and think this would be something Google could easily do with FB.
I don’t think it is technically possible for them to let you manage the people that subscribe via RSS. Keep in mind that I am not that technical, so I could be wrong.
Thank you for the great tips, what i really want to focus on is being your visitors friend, do what they expect and what they care about .
Thanks Neil for the enlightening post. It provides accurate facts and all the ingredients to become a brilliant blogger! Sorry Neil, but I have one question.. Right now Im just using simple google analytics, my site has been up for just under a month ( restarted my site), is it worth using feedburner? Still do not understand the benefits of it, thanks in advance!
TechCombo
You should use Feedburner for your RSS feeds. That is something Google Analytics doesn’t track.
I recently talked to Eric Reis and he told me one of his surveys is leading to revenue from his blog. He wanted to know if any of his readers would pay for a workshop. Turns out way more people wanted the class than he expected.
Great post Neil.
Thanks Andrew. Eric is a smart guy, I think he will do really well from his workshops.
Good post, I defiantly agree with feedback, but I don’t think it should influence to much in how you blog or design, because that’s not who you are, that’s just making people happy.
Basically I blog what I want, and if you follow that’s cool!
But I do understand where your coming from.
There is nothing wrong with that either. You don’t have to blog for everyone.
Is it just me or was this the most generic blog post ever?
Actually I do not give a shit who returns to my blog, As long as they saw it once they can return if they so choose to.
But Neil may have a point in respect to what content to dish up. But to be honest the way I see I dish up shit that interest me and what may interest my potential readers and visitors.
Thus a blog can evolve in two ways. (1) Order or (2) Chaos. I tend to like the Chaos version. As even in Chaos there is order.
Chaos works too. You just have to find the style that works for you and leverage it.
good stuff
Awesome round up! Though your survey advice is weak – using an odd likert scale will give readers a middle option. you should also bring up the funnel metaphor all books about questionnaires mention.
I have seen the surveying work well for other bloggers. The only problem with it is that you need some visitors for it to work effectively.
Great article Neil, thanks for recommending Steve Blank’s blog, I like it too.
Great article Neil!
Awesome post! I am very new to blogging and it’s always great to get advice from people who know what their talking about. I really like Skribit, and will be checking that out. Thanks!
Hi Neil,
Gr8 post and really nice read, find very useful for new bloggers like me.
Cheers,
Sandy
P.S- May be you can have a look at my blog and provide your feedback.
Thanks for the for the tips, Neil. I’ll keep this in mind as I continue to improve our blog at Jippidy.com
Lots of good information to take away from this, thank you!
Creating a great blog is a lot harder then it sounds, but this will help me get a better understanding of how to do it.
Excellent post; a great kickoff for those turning towards their customers in their blogs. A followup with the OODA Loop for ongoing optimization would be terrific.
thanks a lot good work…..keep it up…
http://www.ipho...ogs/mobile.html
Interesting post! Thanks… Now back to work for housetrip.com
Good article, some great tips for new bloggers like me- thanks!
This software is great for a more interesting approach to developing a site through understanding and getting to know users-
http://visualdn...com/publishers/
Just added Skribit, thanks !