I decided to stop posting new articles on my blogs for three months. The idea was to test if regular posting is important for maintaining usual number of visitors. The result was 50% less visitors. The other important result was that number of viewers of "good" articles is also reduced but "only" for 25%.
So what we should do? Post regularly important articles. Probably you should work on you articles a little bit more in order to make it better. But keep in mind that regular posting is very important. After all, who would watch CNN with "perfect news" from last year?
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Friday, January 4, 2008
Use statistics to improve your writing
You write and post your articles on your website or blog, but you have no idea whether your articles are good or not. The ideal situation would be that you have mandatory poll where visitors must rate your article. However, using this technique you will certainly loose visitors. So what you can do? Use statistics from article directories. You should post your articles on article directories anyway, so you can use their statistics. Their statistics is far from perfect. You will probably find in the most of them only the number of views. So what is good about that and what is a View anyway?
A view is usually the number of users that found your summary interesting enough to click on the link to read the rest of article. The more views the better. This number alone will not tell you much about your articles. But if you compare number of views for all articles, you can find what articles have the most views. Investigate the article with the most views, and check what is good about it? Check the title and the summary. Viewer clicks on the link that leads to your article having only two or three parameters: Title, Summary and Author name. Also check your articles with the least number of views and try to find out what is wrong with them. Using statistics this way you can find out what your audience likes and what dislikes.
Sometimes you will have statistics about how many users decide to click on the link to your site (meaning that they like your article and want to see more of them). You can now repeat the procedure in order to find the likes and dislikes of your audience. The article directory with the best statistics is Ezinearticles where you can track these statistics:
How to track statistics for articles that are published in different period, maybe even in different year? The one that is older should have greater number of views, but the newer one might be better. It is possible to compare them using average views per day. You will have to calculate this by yourself as AVPD = Views / Days in public, where the Days in public is the number of days elapsed from the date of publication. For example article A is published 15 days ago and has 150 views, and article B is published 350 days ago and has 1050 views. The first article will have 10 average views per day, and the second article will have 3 AVPG. Therefore the first one is better. You can also record the number of views at the beginning and at the end of a certain period of time. This way you can calculate how many views a certain article received during that period of time. For example: 10 days ago article A had 900 views and article B had 30 views. Today, article A has 950 views and article B 150 views. During that period of time the article A gained 50 views and the article B gained 120 views. That means that the second one is the better. You can speed up this calculation with some spreadsheet program.
A view is usually the number of users that found your summary interesting enough to click on the link to read the rest of article. The more views the better. This number alone will not tell you much about your articles. But if you compare number of views for all articles, you can find what articles have the most views. Investigate the article with the most views, and check what is good about it? Check the title and the summary. Viewer clicks on the link that leads to your article having only two or three parameters: Title, Summary and Author name. Also check your articles with the least number of views and try to find out what is wrong with them. Using statistics this way you can find out what your audience likes and what dislikes.
Sometimes you will have statistics about how many users decide to click on the link to your site (meaning that they like your article and want to see more of them). You can now repeat the procedure in order to find the likes and dislikes of your audience. The article directory with the best statistics is Ezinearticles where you can track these statistics:
* Views - Displaying the number of times this article has been viewed by visitors of EzineArticles.com
* EzinePublisher - Displaying the number of times the EzinePublisher link has been clicked for this particular article by visitors of EzineArticles.com viewing this article.
* URLClicks - Displaying the number of times a link in the body or resource box has been clicked for this particular article by visitors of EzineArticles.com viewing this article.
* Emailed - Displaying the number of times this article has been "Forwarded To A Friend" from visitors of EzineArticles.com
* Comments - Displaying the number of times this article has been commented on by visitors of EzineArticles.com
* Votes - Displaying the number of times your articles has been rated by visitors of EzineArticles.com
* Rating - The current rating of this article. The rating system is based on a 5-Star rating
How to track statistics for articles that are published in different period, maybe even in different year? The one that is older should have greater number of views, but the newer one might be better. It is possible to compare them using average views per day. You will have to calculate this by yourself as AVPD = Views / Days in public, where the Days in public is the number of days elapsed from the date of publication. For example article A is published 15 days ago and has 150 views, and article B is published 350 days ago and has 1050 views. The first article will have 10 average views per day, and the second article will have 3 AVPG. Therefore the first one is better. You can also record the number of views at the beginning and at the end of a certain period of time. This way you can calculate how many views a certain article received during that period of time. For example: 10 days ago article A had 900 views and article B had 30 views. Today, article A has 950 views and article B 150 views. During that period of time the article A gained 50 views and the article B gained 120 views. That means that the second one is the better. You can speed up this calculation with some spreadsheet program.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Optimizing your articles
To submit your article to an article directory you must have following parameters about your article: title, category, summary, keywords, resource, body. Let's talk about these parameters.
Title
The dictionary definition says that title is an identifying name given to the article. But the title has some other functions, to intrigue the visitor to actually read you article, and to intrigue web search engine (like Google) to put it high on the search lists. How a title can attract a visitor to read your article? Title should say that there is something of value for him in the article. Basic human needs is related to personal physical and mental needs. Physical needs are food, sleep, water, clothing, sex. Mental needs are need of security and safety, need of health, need of respect for oneself, need of excitement and variation, need of significance (making a difference), need of connecting with others. One way to prioritize them is Need Hierarchy Theory of Abraham Maslow. To sum it up the title should relate to one or more of human needs. For example if your article is about yoga you could address the benefit on health and self respect.
Category
This parameter is not necessary to specify, because usually you choose one from the list of categories. Categories among directories are often similar or even the same, but sometimes they can differ. Therefore you could note a category or two where you want to put your article. That will speed up the process of submission.
Summary
This is mandatory parameter and it quite self explanatory. Usually two to three sentences are enough. You could write summary after you finish writing the article, but sometimes you could start writing article with writing summary. If you start with summary, that could be a good starting point for writing an article. What should you write in summary? Summary should elaborate the title you wrote. Also it should intrigue the visitor to click on link leading to the body of article. The summary should also be formulated in a way to put a page with summary high in search result. You can achieve that by mentioning a hot search words. If you are in doubt if you should mention stock or share, then consulting Google trends you could find out that the stock is more frequent than share in Google searches. Therefore you should use stock.
Keyword
You should mention keywords separated by comma. That is usual way of writing keywords. What keywords you should use? Write as many keywords as you can remember. If you have to many of them, then using Google trends you can eliminate the ones with lower ranks. For example if you are in doubt between shareholder and stockholder you will eliminate stockholder.
Resource
Basically resource should say: I am an authority in my subject and click here and visit my site. First of all you should write your name. Also, the reader should be intrigued to click on the link to your site. To achieve that you should write what is unique about your site and why the reader should visit it. There should be a call for action like "To see more of my articles visit my site". Depending on the article directory resource box can contain html code, so you could write two kinds of resource box, the one with html code and the one without. Resource box is not tied to a certain article. It is usually the same for all of your articles, and you will usually use the one with html code. Some authors say that you should not put all possible links to all of your sites. The reason for that is that you should build your credibility and the person with sites about hiking, sport and insurance could lose some credibility in insurance. Therefore you could have different resources for different areas of your expertise.
Body
This parameter is actually your article. You should put keywords in it, but I think that you should not be obsessed with search engine optimization. Be obsessed with the quality of your article. Visitors will like good articles and dislike the bad ones. No keyword will change that.
Having all this in mind you can create some template for article that looks like this:
*******************
Title:
Summary:
Keywords:
Resource: I am John John and I am a great hiker and you should visit my site in order to see the pictures from the Himalaya.
I am John John and I am a great hiker and you should visit my site hike.hike.com in order to see the pictures from the Himalaya.
I am John John and I am MBA. I am an expert in Insurance. If you have troubles with insurance go and read more of my articles on my site.
Body:
*******************
Title
The dictionary definition says that title is an identifying name given to the article. But the title has some other functions, to intrigue the visitor to actually read you article, and to intrigue web search engine (like Google) to put it high on the search lists. How a title can attract a visitor to read your article? Title should say that there is something of value for him in the article. Basic human needs is related to personal physical and mental needs. Physical needs are food, sleep, water, clothing, sex. Mental needs are need of security and safety, need of health, need of respect for oneself, need of excitement and variation, need of significance (making a difference), need of connecting with others. One way to prioritize them is Need Hierarchy Theory of Abraham Maslow. To sum it up the title should relate to one or more of human needs. For example if your article is about yoga you could address the benefit on health and self respect.
Category
This parameter is not necessary to specify, because usually you choose one from the list of categories. Categories among directories are often similar or even the same, but sometimes they can differ. Therefore you could note a category or two where you want to put your article. That will speed up the process of submission.
Summary
This is mandatory parameter and it quite self explanatory. Usually two to three sentences are enough. You could write summary after you finish writing the article, but sometimes you could start writing article with writing summary. If you start with summary, that could be a good starting point for writing an article. What should you write in summary? Summary should elaborate the title you wrote. Also it should intrigue the visitor to click on link leading to the body of article. The summary should also be formulated in a way to put a page with summary high in search result. You can achieve that by mentioning a hot search words. If you are in doubt if you should mention stock or share, then consulting Google trends you could find out that the stock is more frequent than share in Google searches. Therefore you should use stock.
Keyword
You should mention keywords separated by comma. That is usual way of writing keywords. What keywords you should use? Write as many keywords as you can remember. If you have to many of them, then using Google trends you can eliminate the ones with lower ranks. For example if you are in doubt between shareholder and stockholder you will eliminate stockholder.
Resource
Basically resource should say: I am an authority in my subject and click here and visit my site. First of all you should write your name. Also, the reader should be intrigued to click on the link to your site. To achieve that you should write what is unique about your site and why the reader should visit it. There should be a call for action like "To see more of my articles visit my site". Depending on the article directory resource box can contain html code, so you could write two kinds of resource box, the one with html code and the one without. Resource box is not tied to a certain article. It is usually the same for all of your articles, and you will usually use the one with html code. Some authors say that you should not put all possible links to all of your sites. The reason for that is that you should build your credibility and the person with sites about hiking, sport and insurance could lose some credibility in insurance. Therefore you could have different resources for different areas of your expertise.
Body
This parameter is actually your article. You should put keywords in it, but I think that you should not be obsessed with search engine optimization. Be obsessed with the quality of your article. Visitors will like good articles and dislike the bad ones. No keyword will change that.
Having all this in mind you can create some template for article that looks like this:
*******************
Title:
Summary:
Keywords:
Resource: I am John John and I am a great hiker and you should visit my site in order to see the pictures from the Himalaya.
I am John John and I am a great hiker and you should visit my site hike.hike.com in order to see the pictures from the Himalaya.
I am John John and I am MBA. I am an expert in Insurance. If you have troubles with insurance go and read more of my articles on my site.
Body:
*******************
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Simplifying article submission
Almost all articles about marketing your blog tells us that we should publish our articles to the article directories. For those uninformed, article directories are the places where one can submit his article for sharing for free. Articles usually have certain title, category, summary, keywords, resource part and body. It is obvious what those parameters are for, but I will elaborate it anyway in another article.
It is wise to type your articles in some document editor like Google Docs, Open Office or MS Office. The structure of your articles should be like this:
Title: ...
Category: ...
Summary: ...
Keywords: ...
Resource: ...
Body: ...
Having article in this format, you can submit your articles very fast using copy paste. Here is an example:
------------------------------------------
Title: How to find ideas for writing using Google?
Category: Creative writing
Summary: Using Google search you can find what you want. You could even find an idea for your next article.
Keywords: creative writing, writing assistance, using Google
Resource: Flavious Maximus is a writer who writes about creative writing and you can find his articles on his blog
Body: You can use random word generator a few times: for example you could use http://www.zokutou.co.uk/randomword/. I tried it in order to get three words and here they are: moderation, elite, tourist. Then you can type them in Google and find web pages with these words. After reading several pages you might find an idea about your article.
------------------------------------------
It is wise to type your articles in some document editor like Google Docs, Open Office or MS Office. The structure of your articles should be like this:
Title: ...
Category: ...
Summary: ...
Keywords: ...
Resource: ...
Body: ...
Having article in this format, you can submit your articles very fast using copy paste. Here is an example:
------------------------------------------
Title: How to find ideas for writing using Google?
Category: Creative writing
Summary: Using Google search you can find what you want. You could even find an idea for your next article.
Keywords: creative writing, writing assistance, using Google
Resource: Flavious Maximus is a writer who writes about creative writing and you can find his articles on his blog
Body: You can use random word generator a few times: for example you could use http://www.zokutou.co.uk/randomword/. I tried it in order to get three words and here they are: moderation, elite, tourist. Then you can type them in Google and find web pages with these words. After reading several pages you might find an idea about your article.
------------------------------------------
Thursday, December 6, 2007
What are you going to find here?
I am an author of this blog, and as I manage it, I encounter some problems. Sometimes I solve them, and that solutions and ideas will be posted here.
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