V. Improvements Introduction

Before making improvements you need to understand 3 things:

I answer these questions with my blog:

1)      The purpose of the blog “Cutie, the Triple D Gamer” is to tell the video game industry and its customers the good deeds and production of women professionals in gaming. To also discuss the impact of sexuality on video games and give advice and tips about Gamer Relationships.

2)      I want users to take these actions on my blog:

a)      Sign up for RSS Feeds

b)      Sign up for email newsletters

c)      Follow updates via social networks

d)     Ask questions for the advice columns

e)      Request reviews, interviews, investments, sponsorship or job opportunities

3)      The main goals for my blog:

a)      Generate revenue from ads using Google AdSense by March then Google Adwords by May 2012.

b)      Guest posting by March 2012

c)      Create opportunities to establish investors, affiliates, sponsors and client leads by June 2012

d)     Create an opportunity to attend gaming events and conferences by June 2012 for E3.

e)      Users are informed about a lot of my favorite areas and respond with their own experiences.

From these tips, I can customize a marketing strategy to complete my goals in a timely fashion. But first, understanding where you need to tweak is vital.

Tweaking

The basic tweaks for any blog come from the content itself. Just by posting more value-based content you notice increases in the following stats:

Making the appearance of the content and the blog even more user-friendly will increase the same stats. Implementing a social media marketing plan will increase these:

These increases in the big picture will help you build a community of superfans, customer base and/or open opportunities that you now seek with your blog.

My Content Management System

My content management system generally includes custom type posts with value-based content (critic-type, advice/tips) and opinionated content (ranting, mixture of value). This mix is what I like to call Featurettes. Featurettes are highly selective content that aims to satisfy users and interact with them. When it comes to using SEO and Meta tags, this type of content is the key to top rankings. Being a social media marketing consultant, I do a lot of these for my clients.

My schedule includes daily postings according to a chart I designed to split up the content.

Sample Chart

Legend: “X” is the letter representing Featurettes.

Imagine you have a pie that represents your blog and each slice represents a featurette. You can’t eat the whole pie at once, so you allocate which days you can eat it on. I don’t want all my users to get the full pie in one day. To further spread allocation, which leads to how to use social media to market your blog, pick a couple of Featurettes per social network.

Marketing Plan

The basics of a marketing plan are to get people to notice your content, like it, and ask more of it.

Getting Content Noticed

Indirectly

Directly

The content will be gold. How do you know people like it?

How will people request it?

Blog Snapshots

VI. StatCounter Analysis

Blog Name: Enter the Q Ann

Last Blog Date: 12/16/2011

Date of Testing: Jan 11, 2012   | Range:  December 11, 2012 – Jan 11, 2012

# of Followers: 1   | # of Subscriptions:  3 via Feedburner

# of posts:  29 | # of pages:  3 | total # of comments: 3

Total of page views of all time (or in-range):  47

Note: Migration from Posterous.com in December.

Type of content: Media-oriented, download-accessible

Main Features:

Past Social Marketing Plan:

1.         Post to popular social networks equally or cross-posting.

2.         Non-frequent scheduled posting

3.         Email subscriptions

4.         Viewable on mobile devices

Improvements using StatCounter

Summary - Entertheqann.wordpress.com - StatCounter-225726

Image 1

StatCounter can display summary data [View Image 1] in a bar graph, area graph or no graph types. Upon browsing the bar graph with colored blocks representing page loads, unique visits and returning visits I notice the page loads doubled than unique visits in Dec 2011 but dropped more than half in January 2012. The returning visits were slim to none.

Analysis:

The common solution:

StatCounter Tabs/Sections

The Popular Pages section list the heavily populated pages and posts on the blog with a total hit number.

The Entry Pages section lists the posts and pages that visitors enter the blog with. You can tell a lot by how the title of these pages and posts get visitors. What are these visitors looking for? Knowing what they want to read lets me adjust my content types and push out more related information.

The Exists Pages and Posts list the posts and pages visitors exit the blog with. To cover my exits, I have to understand the entry of them. There’s a different collation to the entry and exist posts and pages. This group shows almost the same posts and pages. That lets me know that visitors only wanted to read the one post/page or getting content from a reader that only displays that one post. Therefore I need to draw back visitors by listing more of my content links in the posts and pages.

The “Came From”, “Keyword Activity”, “Search” sections would display referrals, keyword search terms and search engine traffic. Unfortunately none recorded at the time of review. The solution to increase this data would be to use SEO tactics and trackbacks.

No Exit Links section activity. This shows outbound links. To increase this data would be to include outbound links in a sidebar.

Visitor Paths section (View Image 2) are really detailed with information on visitor IP Address, their location and where they went after visiting the site. It also tells you if that particular visitor is a returning visitor.

Path - Entertheqann.wordpress.com - StatCounter-230237

Image 2

Visitor Length section (View Image 3) is a real kicker. These stats display a pie chart with the length of time most visitors stayed. My chart displays a length of 5 seconds over 90% of visitors. That means visitors barely even read the posts. Spammers could have been at work here. To solve this issue, the green area needs to shrink to 0% or close to it. How you say? Produce a higher quality content and at frequent times.

Visit Length Entertheqann.wordpress.com StatCounter

Image 3

My Returning Visits stats are very low, but my first time visitors are higher. Not a surprise. The pie chart needs to display equal piece of first time and returning visitors

Recent Page Load activity can tell you of the date, time, system, browser, location, host name, web page, and referring link that a visitor has visited your blog. You can really notice the popularity of systems and browsers so you can further tailor ads and media types for specific areas.

Recent Visitor activity really narrows it down to the length of time per visitor. You can view the visitor map to see which countries see your content.

The Browsers tab (View Image 4) comes from the list of recent page load activity. Can I make my blog more accessible to other browsers? The same goes for system stats.

Browsers Entertheqann.wordpress.com StatCounter

Image 4

The Downloads tab would display the numbers of downloads and activity from visitors to downloads.

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View the first part of the series “How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blog” here.

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