Blogging success: “What lessons have you learned”
I got an email from a loyal reader this week end asking me point blank what I had learned from my blogging experiments [Described in the “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11].
I’m a little embarassed to say that I don’t have a nicely packaged to-do list for you. For one, I haven’t achieved success and I am still doings TONS of experiments as some of you may have noticed (site layout, polls, etc).
But I did keep track of my ideas in a Notepad file (Ideas - not solutions). And since I don’t want to spend 29H13MINS writing this post (see #14) - here are the quick notes:
1 - Blog for a purpose (sell a product? ego? make money? something else) and stick to it
2 � Why should visitors read your blog (succint mission statement)
3 - Learn to recognize and ignore junk traffic (spent too much time slicing and dicing “junk” = people who landed here for Costa Rica Coffee, etc)
4 - Treasure your most valuable visitors (like Eric Butler@Webtrends, because they provide valuable feedback publicly or privately)
5 - Get people to return (because that’s your “base” = returning users)
6 - Get people to subscribe (because they return)
7 - Engage your audience through comments (because they return too)
8 - Have a �blogosphere presence� (commenting on other relevant blogs drives potential loyal subscribers)
9 - Leave quality posts on top of your blog (for increasing chances of getting people to return)
10 - Forget Adsense (waste of real estate, not worth the $15/mo)
11 - Don�t over-analyze (spent too many hours looking at Fireclick)
12 - RSS Readership is the only metric relevant to bloggers (because that’s your audience)
13 - Use Feedburner (they ROCK)
14 - Watch your time investment (writing stuff, making mods, looking at reports, etc)
15 - And� don�t be shy! (I’m free to blog, free to be right, free to be wrong)
Satisfied? Can we go home now? Not quite. I’m still trying to get my arms around other more general “blogging success” issues. Will post more soon. Tahhh.
Poll: Google vs the Government
I’m really interested in hearing what you think + this is a perfect opportunity for me to try a new service called dPolls. So here is goes:
Background. The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has subpoenaed Google Inc. to turn over data including search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography. Google rejected the DOJ’s subpoena while other portals Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc. and America Online, Inc. have agreed to provide the requested data.
Eric Peterson @ Visual Sciences
Rumor: Bob Chatham leaving Forrester for Visual Sciences. As an reputed analyst, Bob has a unique understanding of e-commerce technologies and knows all the Web analytics vendors very well - this is a tremendous accomplishment for Visual and clearly validates that they have something going on. Congrats to both and best of luck.
The dark side of patents
In his Blackberry blog Aaron Johnson points us to an article on the New Yorker about the NTP/RIM lawsuit, with interesting points regarding the US patent system.
“…The BlackBerry will become the quintessential symbol of something else: a patent system that is out of control.”
I didn’t know much about NTP, but I find this paragraph illuminating:
Unfortunately, the real innovations in this case are not technological but legal. N.T.P. is a company without employees or products. It never tried to build a real business around its patents, and it never licensed them to others, until R.I.M. demonstrated just how lucrative wireless e-mail could be. No one alleges that R.I.M. used N.T.P.�s patents to build the BlackBerry; it invented its system from scratch. N.T.P., holding the patent on an idea and a crude design, waited until another company created a successful business based on similar ideas, and then headed to court.
Sounds familiar?
The process of innovation
I thought I�d expand a little on the process of innovation, in connection with my post on patents. We all look for ideas to do better, at all levels � reaching a higher conversion rate, releasing a new killer feature for our software product, etc. I�ve learned a few lessons as an entrepreneur, and maybe this could be useful to the blog�s audience.
First and foremost, the most important thing for creating innovation is to eradicate any cynicism in your organization. When I was a student at Stanford, I took a Computer Architecture class � it was one of my first classes after I arrived from Europe. The professor started his class outlining some of the pre-requisites/etc, then made a point about most ideas being bad ideas. I still remember the PPT slide with the words on it �There are lots of ideas out there, most of them are bad�. Well, frankly if you know that you are going to get shot down and called stupid everytime you have an idea the most natural reaction is to not talk about ideas.
Second, and related, be mindful of your own reactions when people come share their ideas with you. Sharing an idea, particularly with the boss, etc, is an act of courage. I know for example that building on someone�s idea, whether the idea is eventually dismissed or validated in its original form is the most effective encouraging and rewarding message you can send.
Ideas take time to mature. I�ll give you one example: at Fireclick we quickly figured our customers needed help interpreting their analytical reports. One thing that was missing was some kind of benchmarking, where customer X could compare its conversion rates for instance to other customers in the same vertical. Originally we thought we could have a best practices group, or organize online Webinars to share some of these stats, or even formally introduce customers to each other so they could discuss. None of these worked, until we actually decided to create the Fireclick Index, a benchmarking service for online businesses. That was the answer, which took us 18 months to figure out (we released it in 2003).
Ideas [typically] don�t come from brainstorm, solutions do. That�s just observation, and I could be wrong � I�ve just noticed that brainstorms are good for finding solutions to a *specific* problem. In the early days at Fireclick, we institutionalized a 2H brainstorm every Thursday at 7AM, horrible time of the day for this kind of thing (the intent was to avoid any disruption). In hindsight, these meetings were good because they help set the right corporate environment for innovation, but most of them would typically end up on a frustrating note with no decisions made. By contrast, whenever we have big problem to solve and organize informal brainstorm meetings we find the solution and everyone feels good.
Customer ideas are typically higher quality. We all know this � but it�s so true. Maybe because customers actually point you to a problem you can creatively solve, which is easier.
Communication. This is where I personally struggle the most, partly because I�m a very impatient person and I never take the time to fully �package� my ideas before I share them. In smaller structures, we typically do not have the time to fully research ideas and find the right words to describe it. But it�s an essential step. Make your idea attractive and people will love to discuss it.
Last but not least, take action. It�s ok if you fail, because you�ll have learned something along the way and your next idea will be better. Personally, I�ve failed a lot, with some success along the way that makes it all worth it.
Startup patents issues
Last week we were awarded our third patent. These were early Fireclick patents (1999-2000) relating to web acceleration and predictive pre-download, they are a little special to me and my co-founders actually because they were the first patents we ever filed for Fireclick.
The patent process started in 1999 � during the bubble. We weren�t sure if our technology could really be patented, neither did we know if it was worth patenting. In all honesty we did it because �it had to be done� � spending the money at the time wasn�t too big of an issue for VC-backed startups. I remember our first meeting with the patent attorney, Steve Swernofsky, sometime in the summer of 1999. Stephane Kasriel (Fireclick�s co-founder) and I walked him through the main predictive caching ideas � at the time it was a little abstract because the technology had not been implemented yet. It was just a concept: using click-stream analysis to predict where users would go on a Web site and use a browser client (JavaScript typically) to pre-download content that was likely to be requested.
The meetings went well and we filed 3 or 4 patents on just predictive caching. Then over the years and as we morphed into a leading Web analytics company, we filed an additional 8-9 patents. At that point, the recession hit pretty hard and it was a little tough to justify new patent expenses. Patents do not typically have immediate returns and we really wondered why we spent so much time and money on IP, when the real urgency was to build a profitable company.
The jury is still out on the question of patents for start ups. Patents offer protection for startups but are seldom used for revenue generating purposes because the cost of enforcement is typically prohibitive for smaller entities. Also, they can be a distraction factor because these things do take time from the company brains.
Meanwhile, I think we did a fantastic job of bolstering our patent portfolio, with many more on the way. It�s always nice to get an email from your patent attorney saying �Good news, Patent 123 has been awarded!�. And it does a little something when you see companies like Google actually using some of “your” tech�
Session length, part 2
Let’s take this report to the next level and slice it a bit. (BTW, Session length part 1 can be found here).
1 - First time vs Returning users
Take a look at this example. Interesting but you can’t be surprised. The 1-page exit rate plummets from 35% to 15% for returning users. Also note that the 3-page “bump” is more pronounced for returning users - as if they came just to check if their favorite site had the product they’re looking for - and then left.
2 - Slicing by visit number
We’re now looking at the influence of a user’s visit number over session length. Take a look at this distribution . This time, the chart is not a distribution but a cumulative chart indicating how many users leave after X page views, as a percentage. And we’re doing this for users on their 2nd visit to the site, 3rd visit, 4th and 5th. Again, interesting to see that the more visits to the site, the longer the session. People seem to have more patience for a site they know.
3 - Slicing by Geography
Let’s try to see if geography has any influence. See here the distribution for San Francisco vs New York. Again, interesting and not terribly surprising to see that browsing patterns aren’t that different based on where you live (*in general*, there are expections).
4 - Slicing by Entry page
In this final (and most interesting example!), we’re looking at the influence of the landing page on session length. In blue, campaigns with the home page as the landing page, in red, campaigns with a custom page for the landing page. Take a look and email me your thoughts (or drop a comment)…
Until next time - for part 3.
Adios Google AdSense
I’m putting an end to the blog experiments, having learned many many things along the way. I promise I will document these lessons in the next 5-6 days. For now, a couple of very important changes:
(1) Adios Google AdSense. Too much hassle for too little benefit - I also have a problem routinely seeing ads on my site which are contrary to my beliefs (”Web analytics is dead”, etc.) - for any money.
(2) I’ve renamed this blog Coffee, Sun & Technology, and created 2 sub categories: E-Commerce (where all the Web analytics posts will go) and Web technologies (covering other interesting things happening right now on the Web). This transition happened pretty seamlessly but I’m still dealing with a few smaller issues.
By the way, you don’t need to change any of your links. The domain www.coffeesunanalytics.com is redirecting to www.coffeesuntechnology.com automatically. Thanks for reading and happy new year, we’ll see you next week.
Using analytics to drive more traffic to my blog, part 11
More on feeds While I have fewer and fewer direct visits to the site, the feed circulation has been steadily increasing since mid-November.
These are 7-day moving averages
We’ve discussed earlier the hypothesis of a 10 to 12 day offset between direct traffic to the site and feed circulation. But looking at this chart I’m prompted to make another hypothesis: the reason why my direct traffic is down might be because visitors to the site subscribe to the feed and don’t come back to the site directly.
I think I’m just harvesting my November traffic generation efforts - and slowly depleting my pool of prospect subscribers. What’s interesting in all of this is the Google Adsense Click-through rates, which have increased as well. I have no explanation for this yet - even the number of clicks has gone up.
Google Analytics update
Some of you asked me my my review of Google Analytics will be complete. I’m just waiting for the GA team to fix their current issues before I publish anything. My understanding is that they are working hard on scalability issues and it’s only fair to give them some more time before a more detailed review.