You don’t need to be a big-time blogger to need to outsource some aspect of your blog. A beginning blogger with a serious business plan might want to contract a designer to create a skin for their blog. A entrepreneurial blogger might want to outsource some writing, or have an agency provide social media strategy for the blog.

There are plenty of reasons why you might outsource some aspect of your blogging. But once you’ve identified the need, how should you proceed?

Don’t make your first step trying to find good candidates! Before you go hunting for help, you need to do your homework. Here’s the process I’d recommend.

1. Define what you want.

“I need help with my blog content” is not a clear directive. If you’re going to source help, you need to know what to look for, which means you need to have a clear idea of what, specifically, you want.

Don’t just think in terms of contractor skillsets. Think in terms of your audience. So you want to have a new interface designed for your blog. Great. But what do you want it to do? Do you have a visual identity you want the design to reflect or match? Are there interactive elements — like social media buttons or a subscription box — that, in accordance with your readership objectives, you want to prioritise in your design? Do you have user and usage stats that can help to drive the technical specifications you provide to a designer?

Work out what you think you want, and why, before you start thinking about who might do the work.

2. Make it measurable.

The word ‘measurable’ really gives the game away — if the first step in this process was to define specific objectives, the next one is to make them measurable.

Some tasks are difficult to measure — the “success” of a new homepage design might seem like one of them. But look a little closer and, whatever the task you’re setting, you’ll likely find ways to assess the results. Perhaps you’ll assess your current traffic metrics and set new goals that you expect the new site design to help meet. Perhaps you’ll require the designer to show you the results of usability testing.

Alternatively, your goals might be internal — related to your time or operations. Maybe you want to save time — say, two days a week — by outsourcing some of your blog post research and writing tasks. Fine. But make sure you’re prepared to track the time you spend managing your contractor, to make sure that you haven’t simply replaced two days’ writing with two days’ contractor management!

As part of setting measurable goals, don’t forget to apply a timeline to each! This is the most basic way for you to assess whether your outsourced work is on track.

3. Set a budget.

Now that you have an idea of what you want, and what benefits you need it to bring, you should be able to translate those benefits into a dollar value, and decide on the investment you’re willing to make to achieve that goal.

You might want the new design for your blog to increase average per-session pageviews by 1.5 within the first three months. Great! What will that do for your advertising revenues in that time? And how much can you afford to invest to generate this return?

Setting a budget is an essential step in the process. This will help you to qualify candidates early in the process, and save you from spending time talking to “prospective” contractors who really aren’t in your market at all.

4. Seek recommendations.

Unless you have experience in a given market space or discipline and believe you have the skills to select good talent off the bat, you might consider asking peers and colleagues for talent recommendations. Whether you’re outsourcing blog content production or your accounting tasks, personal recommendations are the best way to have some assurance that you’ll get what you expect.

Alternatively — or additionally — you might call for expressions of interest through your blog, your social networks, your professional networks, and other likely sources. To me, these approaches are still better options than advertising blindly on freelance networks, or scouring the web in an effort to find that needle in a haystack — good help that you can afford and trust. Recommendations are best.

5. Research the provider.

However you obtain recommendations, research the provider before you contact them. Conducting your own research is important — you never know what information a quick web search will turn up. Hopefully it’s the same information the contractor in question will provide to you, but if it’s not the kind of detail they’d likely share, you’ll be glad you looked into their work yourself.

If the contractor is local, your peers or colleagues may know them, so again: ask around. Encourage people to be candid and to give you their honest opinions, but also be sure to find out the bases for those assessments. Try to remain as open-minded and objective as possible at this point, so you can create a shortlist of at least two — but hopefully three or four — providers you believe might suit the job.

6. Make contact.

Make careful observation of each shortlisted candidate from the moment of your first contact. Everything they do and say will provide clues as to how well you may be able to work with them. If something makes you uncomfortable, try to work out what it is and why it’s a problem.

Again, it’s important to try to remain reasonable and objective at this point. The fact that your potential designer is wearing a suit and tie doesn’t mean he’s not as creative as the previous candidate, who rolled up to the meeting in ripped jeans and cool runners.

Try to get all the information from the candidate that you’ll need to make your outsourcing decision. The things I want to have in hand when it comes time to assess my options include:

• contact details
• competent past work examples
• a pitch, brief, or written document that explains what they’ll provide, for what value, and shows that they understand and agree to my expectations, goals, and time and budget constraints
• great references from current clients
• personal experience with the candidate (it doesn’t matter whether I’ve met them to discuss the job over coffee, or over Skype: I want to meet them one way or another!).

Now, the hiring decision is all yours. To make sure you’re protected, though, you might want to ensure:

• you both sign a legally binding written contract that explains the work and the work arrangements
• your contractor has any insurances you feel are necessary
• you’ve discussed and agreed upon any copyright and intellectual property considerations
• you’ve had the contractor sign a non-disclosure and/or anti-competition agreement if you feel that’s necessary.

These steps aren’t substitutes for good research and gut instinct, but they may help you if your research and instinct don’t pay off for some reason.

Have you outsourced any aspects of your blog? How did the process work for you?

About the Author: Georgina has more than ten years’ experience writing and editing for web, print and voice. She now blogs for WebWorkerDaily and SitePoint, and consults on content to a range of other clients.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How to Outsource Your Blog… Or Part of It

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Ever run out of things to write about on your blog?

In this video screencast I want to show you how I came up with over 6000 ideas to write about on my blog using two tools – an Auto Responder (I use Aweber (aff)) and a Simple Survey.

Setting this up took me all of 15 minutes work – after that it’s just been a matter of sitting back and watching the ideas roll in.

You may not be able to generate 6000 ideas (and the reality is that I can’t use that many) but this technique can be used on even a smallish blog.

Video Notes

• Watch the full sized version (which may help with picking up all the detail in the video) at Become a Playful Blogger
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

How to Generate Ideas to Write About on Your Blog – Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Today I want to show you a technique that I’ve been using just for the last few months, on how to come up with ideas to write about on your Blog.

A lot of blogger face this problem – after a few months of blogging you run out of all those great ideas that you had when you started your blog, and you want to come up with more.

This is a technique that will work best on a blog with lots of readers, but even just some readers that, particularly readers that are subscribing to your newsletter, it can be used quite effectively, even in small numbers over a longer period of time.

So, you can see on the screen here, I’ve opened up AWeber. AWeber’s my email newsletter tool that I’ve talked about numerous times on ProBlogger.

What I’ve opened up here is the auto responder sequence for my Digital Photography School (I have a number of them).

This is an auto-responder that I’ve set up for DPS and one of the newsletters, and you can see here that on this particular one I have seven different messages that go out once someone subscribes to my newsletter. These are automated messages that go out at pre-determined intervals. You can see here the intervals on the left, they get a Welcome to DPS message straight away on the first day they sign up. Then they get a series of informational newsletters including one promotional one. So they actually hear about he products that we have and get offered a discount, but they also get emails that are purely informational that give them quality links back into archives on the site.

Number seven here is the one I want to talk about today. “What would you like to learn about Photography Next?” is the title of it.

I’ve already opened it up here. Now, they’re getting this email, you’ll see there, it’s around four months into their sequence. So they’ve already been subscribed for a while, they’ve been getting our weekly newsletter updates, which is in addition to this auto-responder.

So they’ve got some connection with DPS, and then get this email. Basically thanks them for joining, and introduces the idea that we’re doing some planning for the site which we’re always doing, and at the time I started this auto-responder, I was actually doing a week of intensive planning, and introduces the concept we want it to be, DPS to be as helpful as possible and we’ve got a survey to help us to improve the site and to come up with topics to write about. And then it gives them a link to click. When they click on that link, they are taken to a survey.

Now, I’ve set it up in SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is a great tool, I think you get a certain amount for free. I’ve signed up for the premium edition, because I’m sending so many people to this as part of my newsletter. This is the back end of SurveyMonkey where you set up your questions, but here you can see the questions that I’m asking.

I introduced the topic again, and talk about why I’m doing the survey. Then I get them to begin to describe themselves in terms of the level of photographer that they are.

Then I ask the question, “I would like to see Tutorials on DPS on the following topics,” and get them to choose all that apply. Now, these are pre-determined topics that we do write on from time to time. The idea of this question is just to work out what the priorities of people are.

Then I ask them which topics would you like to see a more comprehensive guide to? So here what I’m asking is, I’m trying to get a feel for what people might pay for information on, because I want to develop eBooks. So here I’m doing a bit of a survey on that. One of the biggest ones was Travel Photography, so we developed an eBook on that. Then I asked them a question about the post-production tools they use, Photoshop, Paintshop, you know, LightRoom, Aperture, that type of thing.

And this is the golden question, this is the one I want to talk about today. Apart from those listed above, what topics would you like to see covered more on DPS? Feel free to be as specific as you’d like. So anything from a general topic like underwater photography to more specific – like slow-synch flash, or how to sharpen images in Photoshop.

So I’m giving them permission there to go beyond those broad categories we covered earlier in the survey, and to ask specific questions.

Now, SurveyMonkey gives you some great analytics, and so you can see here the answer to that first question, I’ve graphed people. I’ve actually got 71% of readers who say they’ve had a camera for a while, they’re fairly confident, but they want to get more advanced. And we get same sort of stats on these other ones. But what I want to go do down here below, is this last question that I’ve talked about.

You can see here, I’ve had this survey running for a couple of months now. I’ve had 6,369 people tell me what they want to get more information on. Specific questions. Now this is gold. This is really gold.

You get a download button here, and you can download it as a PDF or as an Excel, whatever you’d like.

Now, 6,000+ people have told me what they want to get information on, and they’ve given me specific questions. Now, some of these questions aren’t very helpful, some of the answers aren’t very helpful, you know, I’ve got someone here that says, “Fashion.” Well, we kind of figured that they probably would have ticked the Fashion Photography box above, but here we go, look, fixing problems like blown out skies, or wrinkle removal or skin softening. There’s three topics that I could go away and write on. Fish-eye photography, taking pics of babies and pets. You’ve got a lot of quite interesting stuff here. A lot of these questions are very specific, they’re post-type questions. Some of them people joke and they give you crappy answers and stuff that they’re just trying to be funny. But this is gold. There is 6,000 responses here.

Now DPS has a fairly large audience and so we are able to get 6,000 responses and that’s great. But even a blog that may be getting only a small number of people signing up to it’s newsletter every day, what happens is, as an auto-responder, remember, I’ve set this up as the seventh thing, so they’re getting all this quality information first, but after a few months of being subscribed, they’re actually still got questions, and they’re answering them.

We have around eight or nine hundred people sign up a day for this. So eight or nine hundred people are getting sent to this survey every day. You may have only eight or nine people getting this information every day, but you will find over time, if you have this as part of your auto-responder for a year or two, you’ll begin to build up a bank of questions that you can then draw upon later.

So if I’m ever wondering, you know, “What should I write about today on my blog?” I tell you, that file, that Excel file that I opened up before is one of the first places that I go, because it is just gold, it’s got so much great information.

Hope this has been helpful for you. It’s a technique that I’ve been using over the last few months on my blog and it’s really helped me to come up with a lot of great things to write about on my site.
End of Recording.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How I Generated Over 6000 Ideas to Write About on My Blog in 15 Minutes

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The most common question I’m asked lately seems to be:

“How do you get so many things done?”

To be perfectly honest – it’s a question I would never have anticipated anyone would ever ask of me – as I’ve mentioned here before, before I got into blogging I used to be quite…. well…. lazy.

But since getting into blogging and starting my own business I have turned that around – at least on a work front (Mrs ProBlogger would still like me to do the dishes a little more). Over the last 6 years there may have only been 1-2 days when I didn’t post at least two blog posts – deadlines were never my forte but I’m somewhat obsessed about them now.

Today while out for a walk (something I try to fit in most days) I was pondering this change in me and trying to work out what was behind it. I came up with two things that at the least play a part in this for me and decided to whip out my iPhone and record them as a mini podcast (or walkcast).

PS: my 2nd point reminds me a little of a line in a poem by Rudyard Kipling that I’ve been pondering lately titled IF.

“
If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”

I’m sure there are many interpretations on it – but for me the idea of an unforgiving minute is that time is something that you can’t get back. The next minute of your life is something that will be gone for ever in 60 seconds – in that way it’s unforgiving.

So Kipling suggests filling it with sixty seconds of distance running. Sixty seconds of effort that will make a lasting difference. You might not do a complete marathon in sixty seconds of effort but you’ll certainly be a step closer to it.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How to Get More Done

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Eearlier in the week I asked readers to suggest their favourite free WordPress plugins. The response was great and I’ll pull together a compilation of the most mentioned ones in the coming weeks.

However I’d also love to get your suggestions on the most useful Premium WordPress Plugins.

Over the last few years we’ve seen more and more premium (or paid) WordPress plugins released. At first many bloggers were skeptical about paying for plugins but of late I’ve noticed a bit of a shift and more and more bloggers are willing to pay for quality premium plugins.

If you’re a blogger who has forked out a few dollars for a premium WordPress plugin – I’d love to get your feedback on which ones you’ve found most useful.

So which are your favourite Premium WordPress Plugins – and Why?

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Premium WordPress Plugins – What are Your Favourites?

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It has been a while since we had a survey on the topic of WordPress plugins so today I’d like to kick one off. What are your favourite FREE WordPress Plugins?

Try to keep it to your top 5 so that things don’t get out of hand – but please share which free WordPress plugins are most useful to you in comments below.

If you have some premium/paid ones that you want to suggest – please hold off on sharing those as I’ll run a post later in the week asking for your feedback on those.

So – what are you favourite free WordPress Plugins – and Why? Over to you!

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Free WordPress Plugins – What are Your Favourites?

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It’s been a few days since I launched the latest ProBlogger eBook – Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers. Since that time we’ve seen over 1000 purchases of the book and have had some fantastic feedback.

Here are of the first reviews so you can hear what others are saying about it.

1. Clare at Women in Business writes

“The eBook shifted my perspective on the purpose and value of each blog post. Sure you can have your call to actions at the end of the blog post – but does the content you’ve written support and encourage your visitor to take that action?” Read the full review

2. Ali Hale writes

“While reading, though, I was struck by how useful this book would be for many newer writers in the blogosphere. I see basic grammatical mistakes every day, and I also see posts which are fundamentally sound but poorly structured or formatted. It’s so easy to lose attention online, and this ebook would be invaluable to bloggers who are struggling to build an audience.” Read the full review

3. Kristi from Kikolani writes

“In addition to the checklist, the beginning of the ebook gives you 10 questions to ask about your blog as a whole, as well as 11 questions to ask before writing each post. If you refer to these answers as you write each blog post, your writing will not only improve, but you should also see better reader engagement with your posts as well.” Read the full review

4. Paul from Blogging Teacher Writes

“When you find a weakness in your writing all you need to do is look up that section in the ebook, learn how to improve that part of your writing, and put it into practice. In no time it will become second nature and you’ll be writing high quality blog posts with complete ease.” Read the full review

5. Jennifer from Gurls Asylum

The Copywriting Score Card for Bloggers is a great product for all writers, especially those writing for the web. It shows many blog copywriting secrets in a way that is easily understood. The topics are actionable and often have a nice tip to help you use the topic better.” Read the full Review.

6. Stanford from Pushing Social

Check out this cool video review of the Scorecard – Stanford gives some thoughtful and considered analysis.

Updates and Price Increases

The feedback has overwhelmingly been a positive so far – however we’ve also had a couple of good suggestions on how to make it better. Glenn and I are already talking about how we can update it (any update will be given to those who already have it for free) to make it even more useful and anticipate having a significant update by the time the price goes up on 1 September (again, if you buy it now you’ll get the update free).

Keep in mind that the current price of $9.97 USD is an introductory offer. We’re putting the price up on 1 September. We’ve previously said that the price will go up to $14.97 USD but the feedback we’re getting is that it is worth more and with the updates we’ll most certainly put it up beyond that mark.

So to secure it at the introductory discount grab your own copy of Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers now.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

6 Reviews of the Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers

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You’re about to hit Publish on your next blog post – but is it up to scratch?

• Is it compelling?
• Is it easy to read?
• Is it grammatically correct?
• Is it optimised for search engines?

Wouldn’t it be great to have an editor by your side to look over your next blog post before you hit Publish, to make sure it’s really ready?

Today I’m excited to announce a brand new ProBlogger resource – The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers. It’s a system to help you get your posts ready to publish and well optimized for readers… and Google.

I’ve been working on this for months with another Great Aussie blogger and experienced Copywriter – Glenn Murray from Divine Write and am excited not only because it’s comprehensive and will help many bloggers – but also because for the next two weeks it is only $9.97 USD!

Why the Copywriting Scorecard is Important

As bloggers we know how important content is to the success of our blogs and we all know how those little things can make a big difference to the impact of that content.

We know the theory – but if you’re anything like me there are days where you hit Publish on posts that could be better.

The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers is a downloadable eBook providing a list of recommendations to follow, as well as pitfalls to avoid, as you write that next blog post. It’s a checklist of things that are common in most great copywriting and mistakes that are commonly found in ineffective copy.

All up, there are 63 things to consider, all comprehensively explained and divided into these four easy to read sections:

1. Writing — How to write engaging compelling posts.
2. Scannability — How to ensure your posts are easy to scan read.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO) — How to write posts that Google will like.
4. Grammar — How to avoid errors that undermine your credibility.

Then, once you’ve read the recommendations, simply print out a scorecard, check how many recommendations you’ve incorporated into your post, then add up your score for a total out of 100. The higher your score, the more effective your post is likely to be (I scored 91/100 on this post).

Using the Scorecard you’ll quickly identify things you can improve to help your post reach its full potential – all before hitting Publish

In addition to the printable Scorecard – you’ll also get plenty of teaching explaining each element as well as 2 additional chapters of teaching – one looking at principles to consider before you start writing and another on writing your posts.

What Others Say about the Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers

We made this ebook available to a small group of friends and readers – here’s what some of them have had to say.

Brian Clark – Editor of CopyBlogger

“I’ve built a multimillion dollar business not only by teaching the intersection of blogging and copywriting, but by using it. The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers provides clear guidance on how to put this powerful combination to work for you, too.”

Leo Babauta – Editor of ZenHabits.

“This little guide contains a goldmine of blogging insights. It’s years of expert wisdom distilled for beginners. Blogging is an art form, but this brings some order and science where none existed before.”

James Chartrand – Owner of Men With Pens

“The ProBlogger Scorecard reveals some best-practice techniques I use every day at my blog – and even some I wished Darren and Glenn would’ve kept a secret! It gives a clear checklist to bloggers who are serious about becoming my competition, and it provides a ton of practical info to freelancers ready to build a business through blogging.”

Clare Lancaster – Editor of Women In Business, Nett Mag Columnist and Forbes listed woman to follow on Twitter.

“What I like most about this book is the practical business approach it takes to blogging. The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers focuses on the core activities you need to do well in order to have a profitable blog. That is, knowing what actions will improve your business and crafting your blog posts so that readers perform those actions.

Being able to tap into Glenn’s 8 years of copywriting experience makes the price of this eBook a steal. For those of us who are blogging for passion AND profit, The Copywriting Scorecard is a must read.”

There are more testimonials from others who’ve already read this eBook here.

Grab Your Copy Today

The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers is available to download now. As a launch special we’re making it available for two weeks at 33% off – which means instead of $14.97 you can grab it today for just $9.97.

• Get full details on the Scorecard here
• OR… order it directly and get instant access to it as a downloadable PDF here

Note: if you’re interested in promoting the Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers as an Affiliate check out the details of our program here.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How Well Do Your Blog Posts Score Out of 100?

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Over the last month several hundred bloggers in the SitsGirls and TheBlogFrog communities have come together to tackle 31 Days to Build a Better Blog together. The 31 days are coming to an end this week and I’ve been so excited to see how working through the workbook as a large group has helped so many bloggers.

Almost every day since the challenge started I’ve had participants tell me that their blogs have been growing as a result of participating.

I’ve chatted to a number of participants in the last few days to get their feedback on the workbook and to try to get to the bottom of why it has helped them (or how it could be better) and there has been one consistent piece of feedback that I think is so valuable that I just need to share it.

Image by sevenphonecalls

Here’s the thing:

Almost every person I’ve talked to has said most of the teaching and exercises in the workbook are things that they already knew that they should be doing. The problem was that while they knew it – they were not doing it.

For example – Day 5:

Day 5 of the challenge is to email one of your readers. The idea is to give someone a little unexpected personal attention, to get to know them and to help them in some way beyond what they might expect.

The principle is simple and the concept wouldn’t be foreign to any blogger. It’s something most of us know that would be a worthwhile experience but yet its something that so many bloggers would write off as not important enough to really do.

The reality is that if you did this once a day over a year that you’d have 365 readers (each with their own network) who you’ll have made an impression on.

The impact could be significant, particularly for a new blog, yet for some reason many bloggers are content just to have the knowledge that looking after readers and giving them some personal attention could help their blog – but never take action on it.

Example #2

This same theme came up as a result of the ProBlogger Training Day here in Melbourne two weeks back. Much of what we covered on the day was not particularly new or revolutionary (although for some it was). However this week I’ve had 3 emails from attendees saying talking about how they’ve already grown their blogging business (two doubled their readership and one told me that they’ve just started experimenting with affiliate marketing and are making over $150 a day!).

In each case I asked the blogger what it was that helped them and in every case they told me that they started doing something that they’d always said that they’d start doing.

This post is not a pseudo sales page for my workbook or training days (although sometimes when you pay for something you feel more accountable to take action) – the principle applies whether you use one of my products, read the free posts on ProBlogger or work on your blog alone. The key is to not be satisfied to KNOW how to improve your blog but to move beyond theory and do something.

What should you DO?

There are many things that help to grow a successful blog. In the 31 Days workbook I covered 31 of them but the list is almost endless.

One exercise that you might like to do today is to grab a notebook and pen and jot down as many things that you already know to do to improve a blog. Don’t go looking for ideas or reading more theory today – but make a list of things that you already know that could improve your blog and identify some that you will implement today.

For you it might be increasing your content creation (for those of you who’ve let your posting levels slip), for others it might be paying some more attention to current readers, for others it could be reaching out to other bloggers in your niche, for some it might be about developing that eBook that you’ve been saying you’ll do one day…. the key is to move beyond the theory and do something.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The Key to Successful Blogging: Do Something!

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Posted by randfish

How many presentations do you see that show traffic stats like these?

Or this:

Or this:

These charts aren’t wrong, per se. They’re not lying to you, but they are obscuring the truth, and they’re making it impossible to know what’s going right and wrong.

The problem isn’t that the numbers are inaccurate, it’s that no website is just ONE SITE. A website is a collection of pages, and oftentimes, a collection of lots of different KINDS of pages. Even the simplest of sites, built on blog CMS’ like WordPress or basic CMS’ like Drupal have unique sections within them – the homepage, individual posts, static pages (about, contact, et al.), categories, search pages, posts by month, author, etc. – all of these have different formats, different functions and, almost certainly, different visitor stats.

Yet, for some reason, when we as marketers look at a site, we don’t ask "how are the category pages doing this month?" or "how is the blog performing compared to the white paper articles?" We ask, "how’s the site doing."

The singular answer to that question often obscures a more nuanced, but valuable truth: Different website sections perform differently.

If your car starts having trouble accelerating up hills, you don’t blame the entire car for the subpar performance, you start to examine potential causes (electrical system, engine, tires, etc.) and break these components down until you find the cause. Likewise, with a website, every piece should be performance tested, tuned and monitored on a regular basis.

Don’t do this:

The total page views data is fine as an overview, but we need to monitor each individual section to really understand what’s gaining vs. falling.

Do this:

By segmenting out traffic to URLs that include */blog/* and those that include */ugc/* (YOUmoz), we can see when/where/how each section is rising or falling in traffic and contributing to the overall site’s performance.

Even better, we should do this:

How did I make that chart?

Step 1: Separate the areas of your website by the words/characters in their URL string (or other identifying factors like keywords in their titles). For example, on SEOmoz, we’ve got:

• The Blog – all URLs include /blog
• YOUmoz – all URLs have /UGC
• Guides – nearly all have /articles
• Tools – most URLs are different, but there’s only around 20 so I can lump them together
• etc.

Once I have these segments, I’ll use the URL structures to get data about pageviews (or any other metric I care about) separately through analytics.

Step 2: Use the content filter in Google Analytics to select only those pages that contain the URL string you’re seeking:

 

 By using the simple filter for URLs "containing" /article, I’ve got a segmented report I can now use to start seeing what’s really happening on my site.

pretty simple, right?

Step 3: Filter on each report and grab out the relevant pageviews number on a weekly basis:

I grab those numbers for each of the segments each week (well, actually, Joanna does – but she says it’s less than an hour of work) and plug them into a spreadsheet.

Step 4: Create a spreadsheet and a stacked graph

This spreadsheet shows the number of pageviews to each section of the site

This stacked, area graph shows where traffic is shrinking (e.g. the Beginner’s Guide) vs. growing (e.g. the Blog)

When you run these over long periods of time, you can really see the impact a new section is having, or where problems in traffic might exist. If you neglect to break things out in this fashion, you’ll often find that traffic from one section’s gain may overshadow the loss in another area. This over/under-compensation can hide the real issues for a site, especially in SEO (where indexation, rankings and keyword demand all play inter-connected roles).

Joanna, in her post on benchmarking,  shared this chart:

Also see this larger, detailed version

This helped us to realize where things had gone awry and why (the problem stemmed from some poorly done redirects from Linkscape to Open Site Explorer). I can’t recommend this practice enough – if more marketers managed their analytics in this fashion, we’d have a much easier time identifying potential problems, opportunities and understanding not just the quantity of traffic, but the "whys" behind it.

Anyone with some clever Google Analytics methodologies to build these faster/more efficiently than my Excel hack, please do share!

UPDATE: Some friends from Maki Car Rental put together a stacked pageviews PHP code that pulls from the Google Analytics API here. Thanks!

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Each week I see multiple products launched targeting bloggers wanting to improve their blogs. I’ve tested many of them in my time and the reality is that most don’t deliver what they promise and I don’t promote them. However from time to time – some hit the mark and present unique and helpful information that delivers real value.

This week there were two of these such products that hit the market. Both are quite different in their focus but both are from experts in their field and will help bloggers improve two important aspects of their blogs:

1. Jon Morrow’s Apprentice Program for Guest Bloggers

Jon is someone who has built a career for himself as a copywriter and blogger using Guest Posting. He’s been a guest poster here on ProBlogger numerous times and is a regular on blogs such as CopyBlogger.

Over the last week or so he’s release a series of great videos (here and here are two) on the topic of guest blogging and this week launched a comprehensive program that literally guarantees to get you a guest post on a high profile blog (if you don’t you’ll get your money back).

Jon’s course is a mix of video, private forum, Q&A calls and one on one interaction with Jon.

Guest blogging is a technique many bloggers have used to launch their blogs to great things and Jon’s the perfect person to talk you through how to do it. Sign up Today Here.

2. Gideon Shalwick’s Rapid Video Blogging

Gideon Shalwick has also taken his blogging to the next level by being prolific at one aspect of online discipline – VIDEO. He too has released a series of great videos this week that talk you through different aspects of using video to make money online (check them out here, here and here – they are free and whether you buy the course or not offer great insights) and today launched a great product – Rapid Video Blogging.

Gideon’s course is massive and comprehensive. It includes 125 instructional videos and transcripts/audio version as well as a heap of great tools and resources including videos with great video bloggers, live interactive sessions for Q&A.

Video is an incredibly dynamic medium and mastering it is something many bloggers need to learn – check out Rapid Video Blogging for more information on just how to do that.

Which one is for You?

Both of these resources come from experts in their fields and will present different value to different bloggers. Neither are super cheap entry level products (you’re getting a heap of content with both) and so you’ll want to consider your needs carefully and view some of the free videos that the guys have produced – but if you’ve been thinking about how to take your blogging up a notch lately and want to make an investment into your learning – do give them both consideration.

They both do come with money back satisfaction guarantees and both Jon and Gideon are people I trust to honour that promise.

I’m looking forward to hearing how you enjoy these courses and seeing how they help you improve your blogs.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

2 Products Worth Considering to Improve Your Blog Today

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