As I said in my earlier post, I didn’t go to cybermummy expecting to learn much about the technicalities of blogging. I didn’t think anyone would teach me much about platforms or tech, or even really seo, though I was hoping for a bit from the sesh on stats, especially when I saw there was someone from google analytics there.
Google are the tesco of the online world, doing everything and doing it disturbingly well. They’re the company behind blogger, gmail, wave (what *is* wave for, has anyone worked that out?), they bought feedburner which is a way of delivering your blog feed and getting stats on it, and there’s the free service, google analytics.
I’ve used it before, though not excessively, and it is currently plugged in on this site, so I was very interested to hear the inside view on it. Eve who was doing the talk was wonderfully geeky, and talked about her site and used Pi day as an example. (Which meant that I learnt that Americans use a different day to us as Pi day, they use March 14th instead of 22nd July. Who knew?) The basic overview was, understandably, basic, but the one point that had never occurred to me before that I thought worth repeating was ‘don’t get hung up on bounce rate’.
Bounce rate is related to the number of ppl who arrive at your site, check out where they’ve arrived, and depart again. Usually on a website you’re trying to get ppl to hang around, but if you think about the logistics of blogging, ppl are generally going to come in to read your post, and then they’re going to clear off again. Especially if they are repeat visitors who’ve read all the stuff before, there’s not much to get them to hang around. So, if you’ve got a good core of repeat visitors, bounce rate is not something to worry about – the thing to build on a blog is repeat visitors.
I will be exploring analytics further as I suspect it’s easier to get to grips with than the awstats that’s provided on my hosting package, and will update on that further as and when.
The rest of the session didn’t make a great deal of sense to me, and I wasn’t listening very closely until the Q and A came up, which was when I made my own contribution re wordpress.com v .org as blogged earlier. I think what was lacking from both of the other panellists was an understanding of the world of blogging from the point of view of the blogger. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Belinda knows more about PR and branding than I will ever know, and Justine is head of an incredibly successful website/ forum but neither of them are bloggers. And I do think that blogging is different. And should be different.
For a blog to be good and worthy of returning to, you’ve got to share a part of yourself, and you can’t learn to do that by following a ten point plan. It’s humbling, it’s harrowing, it can be nerve wracking, it can be deadly boring. When it comes down to it though, I’d still be blogging here even if no one was reading.
(Which doesn’t mean you all have to run away, please stick around! :lol:)
Leave a Reply