Five Lessons From A Blog Experiment
Seth Godin posted recently that experiments are only experiments if you’re intentional about learning something. If you don’t approach it this way, it’s not an experiment. It’s a failure.
You can still learn from failure, sure. But you’ll learn faster from an experiment. So…..
With this in mind, I just wrapped up a 4-week experiment where I edited and re-posted daily excerpts from when we were in Ukraine adopting Masha five years ago.
I learned:
- Weekends suck for blog traffic.
- More frequent posts do not equal increased subscriptions.
- Very few readers left comments. People emailed me that they loved the adoption story posts and shared some on Twitter and Facebook, but there was no room for community. Most days, the open-ended questions felt really “slapped on” like a sticker on a piece of furniture.
- Publishing full posts on the home page lead to wonky analytics (ok, I knew this one before…but it made measuring the results of this experiment a bit trickier).
- Traffic flow analytics showed that people were not exploring the blog beyond the home page or that day’s post.
Interesting…
Changes I will be making soon:
- Take weekends off. No posts.
- Make subscription options a lot more visible and in a couple different places.
- Leave more space in the story for comments.
- Adjust my theme to post excerpts on home page, clicking to drill into the full post (email and RSS subscribers still get the full post…how’s that for incentive?).
- Redesign sidebar to encourage to explore/stay/subscribe, add “Top Posts” and “Related Posts” widgets.
I’ll be making other changes and tweaks too, and you guys will continue to be my guinea pigs as I learn and improve both my writing and my efforts to share it.
Thanks for helping out!
What is your passion, and what are you doing to learn and improve how you do it? Leave a comment…
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About Christine
I am a writer, a project manager, and a corporate refugee with a heart for orphans around the world. My two daughters were adopted from Ukraine at ages 12 and 14. I post about writing, chasing dreams, and making a difference in the world, and sometimes I share fun snippets of fiction in-progress.
Yes, I know the pain of encouraging people to help build a conversation on the blog post and everyone resorts to replies (I am guilty sometimes!)
But we have to keep working at it and never give up. Thanks for writing and sharing this post. We have a lot to learn…everyday.
Hope the adjustments do the magic for you!
Joseph
Thanks, Joseph…I’ll keep measuring and adjusting.
Appreciate you coming by and joining the conversation!
Brilliant post Christine! I love your ability and decision to learn and make changes accordingly. I’ve been wrestling with my own blog and so you have encouraged me immensely to take heart and keep tweaking it!
Glad it’s encouraging to you…they say the tweaks are part of the fun. Jury is still out on that for me!
What a great idea to do this!! Maybe I’ll do this–it would help to do blogging smarter, not harder.
It was sure interesting. Some things I kind of expected, but some were a surprise to me!
Keep experimenting! That’s part of the fun of blogging, in my opinion. Not that you asked, but visible subscription options, related posts, and popular posts have seemed to all the the “experiments” that have stuck for me. But my biggest encouragement for you: the best tool a blogger has is great content…and you’ve got it!
On a side note: For some reason, when I get more interaction, traffic seems to be down. But when I have high periods of traffic, interaction seems to go down. I really don’t get this stuff sometimes.
Thanks, Benjer…and I think the ask was implied. If not, the answers are still super-welcome!
I just installed nRelate and added the subscription option at the bottom of posts this week. Popular Posts is coming soon. I am not thrilled with the overall appearance…i think it’s getting unnecessarily busy…but it’s good prep for the Summer Overhaul.
Weird about that inverse relationship between interaction and traffic. That seems counter-intuitive.
Hey there! Yep, my passion is writing, and I’ve been trying to get more blog subscriptions– offering an incentive this summer. I realize that I have more of a chance to be read if it ends up in their e-mails, but not necessarily! I hear you on not putting stuff up on weekends. Also, I’ve made my design as simple as possible, and have tried to make everything very easy. I’ve also realized that so many more people read it than will comment, but the only way to know is if they leave a comment. Not sure how to improve that, so I’m working on it, and in the meantime, just trying to practice the Golden Rule with this. (I have asked someone before if they would put their comment on my blog when they replied on FB; it was so nice, I needed it on there. That’s always an option, get them in the habit :0)
Your’e on blogger, right? I know they added stats a couple years ago…you should be able to get some basic stats from our blog’s dashboard. Not as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but you’ll at least be able to see how many page views you have and how individual posts are doing….
Yeah, I’ve looked at the stats. That’s how I know the number of page views, so I guess I just meant that we don’t really know who actually reads our posts unless they bother to comment. Like Jennie said, I think people reply where they’re most comfortable.
Ahhh gotcha. I think you and Jennie are both right! And if the point is to connect and get people to think, then wherever they choose to do that should be fine with us, right? Just need to find a consolidated way to keep up. I really don’t want people to feel “forgotten” if I don’t acknowledge them.
Good for you! I think it’s weird how people read a post then go back to Facebook or twitter to reply! And although I’m thrilled that so many people have subscribed to my blog, I do think it’s unlikely that they will ever bother to click through and comment – it’s taken me all day to get round to this!!
I am so far behind on the blogs that I read that I kinda can’t throw stones today! Like yours. I’ll stop by soon!! I guess it’s really a question of where they’re comfortable. I just don’t don’t know how to keep up with everyone everywhere.
I’ve learned a lot from “the tribe”
Same conclusion on the weekends Christine, mine even dies a bit on Fridays too…
Me, too, Chris! I haven’t seen a good enough Friday pattern because i haven’t been posting regularly enough on Fridays to tell if it’s a Friday thing or unique to the content. Always keep learning, right?
I’m so glad you decided to post this. My site is new (just 10 posts so far), so I have a LOT to learn. I find it’s tricky to do so with limited time at the moment, but doing my best to pay attention and following blogs like yours seems to help.
It is really hard to prioritize in the early days…and then it’s all too easy to just let it all go after a while. I’m glad that you’re learning and working on your blog bit by bit. Loving your content…you’re really challenging me to think about what i’m consuming.