So you have set up and are running a blog, but how do you know if anyone is
reading it and who those readers are? Just as importantly, how do you keep track
of what others in the blogosphere are saying about your postings? Simple. You
get to grips with the small matter of monitoring your blog. And that means
understanding three simple principles: site analysis, trackbacks and specialist
search engines. Master all three and you will have achieved
blog management nirvana.
There is a reason why social media is so called, and it lies at the very core
of blogging – namely that bloggers link to each other, comment on each
other’s postings, and ultimately create a kind of instantaneous yet virtual
conversational connectivity. By keeping track of who is talking about
what, you can build up an index of relative relevance within the blogosphere,
and paint a picture of your place within it at any given time.
The two main blog search engines are Google Blog Search
(blogsearch.google.com) and Technorati
(www.technorati.com).
Both let you find pretty much any
mention of specific blog postings anywhere online. Although Google does not
release figures of blog coverage, Technorati is not so shy and currently claims
to track in excess of 86 million blogs and 250 million pieces of tagged social
media.
Both these engines are also hugely useful in tracking other bloggers who are discussing similar subject matter to your own blog, but without actually being connected to it. For monitoring your own blog readership, though, the value of these search engines lies in their removal of the requirement for other bloggers to have to enable trackbacks in order for their linkage to be visible to you. Not every blogger will have trackbacks enabled, but Google and Technorati will find the link to your blog regardless.
Or at least that’s the theory. In practice, your blog has to publish a site
feed (either RSS or Atom) and, of course, not everyone does this either. What
the search engines will pick up are links from social bookmarking sites such as
del.icio.us
, which is no bad thing. While the links may not be
evidence of other bloggers talking about your posting, they are evidence that
other bloggers are reading it in the first place. All the standard Google search
operators are supported in Google Blog Search, which allows you to be specific
in your monitoring requirements. Use the “link:” operator followed by your blog
post URL and you will instantly see everyone who has linked to it. Once you have
this information on screen you can set up an email alert to notify you whenever
a new link to that posting is created.
TRACKBACKS, PERMALINKS AND PINGS
So what are trackbacks ? When you publish a posting to your blog, it gets its very own URL to distinguish it from the rest. When someone types this URL into their browser or clicks a link from your blog index page, they are transported to that posting and no other. This is known as a permalink and is a pretty easy concept to understand.
As are blog comments. You have what is, in effect, a mini notice board area attached to each of your blog postings that allows readers (assuming they have the appropriate privileges, if required) to leave their own comments on them. It is easy enough to spot these comments because you can read them for yourself, and just as easy to see who has left them.
But how would you know if someone has commented about your posting within their own blog if they do not publish a site feed that is picked up by Google Blog Search or Technorati? The simple answer is you wouldn’t, unless they have enabled the blogging trackback function.
Most blog publishing platforms (the software used to serve your words of wisdom up to the rest of the web) will scan every link in every posting you publish. If you have linked to a blog that is accepting trackbacks, then it will send a small data packet known as a ping to that blog. This has the effect of notifying the blog in question that someone is talking about them, prompting its software to add a comment of its own to the original post saying, in effect, someone else is talking about me and here’s a direct link to them.
This trackback URL is, however, different to the permalink one and so the
person talking about your blog has to use this within their posting in order to
kickstart the process off, otherwise your blog software will be none the wiser.
Depending on the blogging software being used, the commenting blogger may have
to enter this trackback URL manually although more often than not modern blog
tools can discover such things automatically without
additional user input.
Indeed, the important point here is that you should not actually have to know how trackbacks work in order to be able to benefit from the technology. Just check your blogging software options, or refer to the support documentation, and make sure you enable posts to receive trackbacks and the job is done. Most blogging software will even happily email you a notification whenever a new trackback has been spotted, treating it in exactly the same way as it does a local comment.
Depending on how your blog is set up, you might find the software takes the
comment analogy a step further and requires you to approve the trackback,
as you would a comment, before it is published. This is not such a bad thing,
given the propensity for trackback spam. When a trackback is sent, it usually
comes complete with an extract of the blog posting containing it by way of a
sort of contextual teaser. You can either leave this as is, or edit it before
publication. You cannot edit the content on the originating blog, of course,
only the highlight that appears on yours.
The extract approach also encourages you to visit the other blogger’s site, read the posting and perhaps comment on it, so perpetuating the cycle of social connectivity.
SITE ANALYSIS
Although site analysis is the least granular approach to monitoring the health of your blog – and we would be the first to admit that the information returned is, without doubt, ‘broad brush’ – there is also no doubting that when used in conjunction with both trackbacks and search engines it helps to paint a more complete picture.
Whether the visitor analysis is supplied by your blog publishing host, or performed on a do-it-yourself basis using a free tool such as Google Analytics, a similar level of detail can be obtained. The Google resource is particularly useful following a recent interface revamp, and can now provide a graphical map overview, plotting visitor densities on a geographical basis. Maybe you want to know what languages are spoken by your visitors; Google Analytics can suggest this as well.
But any tool worth its salt should be able to reveal the more useful metrics:
not where your readers come from, but why and how they come. Knowing whether the
majority of your readers are regular visitors or make just one posting and never
return should tell you a lot about the
“stickiness” of your content and enable you to chart the success of any strategy
to improve reader retention. Similarly, you will want to know
how long your readers spend reading your blog, expressed as both percentage and
actual time. Even allowing for the fact that most site
analysis software is not tailored for blog monitoring requirements, standard
data such as the depth of visit can still be useful.
If most of your visitors never travel deeper than one page, the chances are
they are not actually reading much of your content. This could be
because they arrive at your home page and stop there because they don’t like
what they see, or they arrive directly at a specific blog posting
(which is usually the case) and don’t bother investigating further once they’ve
read it – which isn’t unusual given the limited concentration span of the
average web surfer. Google Analytics has one trick up its sleeve that your blog
publisher and other logging tools might not be able to match to the same degree,
and that is the ability to accurately report the keywords driving traffic to
your blog. Again, from the strategy perspective this could be just what you need
to tailor your blog post headings to attract the biggest audience without
actually altering the meaning.
See also: Monitoring Blog monitoring services , Monitoring Trackback spam
