Blog Tips

Once upon a time, wandering through the forest of nonprofit blogs, I stumbled upon a blog, managed by a team based here in Rome. Over the past years, I got to know most of the people involved, as a bunch of great individuals, driven by enthusiasm and passion about their cause: the ICT-KM team at the CGIAR – the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The ICTKM team at CGIAR

The ICT-KM team recently revamped their blog, and merged it with their website. The outcome was a sparkling new blog. I wanted to know more. Time for a talk with two of the ICT-KM members: Antonella Pastore and Enrica Porcari. An interview which touched on many issues dear to our heart: “What are the benefits of social media to nonprofit organisations?”, “What motivates people to blog?”, “Migrating a blog from one platform to another”, “the difference between blogs and traditional Content Management Systems”, “Blog traffic and the importance of good content”…

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I wrote before on how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. I also published a short case study about the influence Twitter-generated traffic had onto my blogs.

Most of the evidence of Twitter-to-Blog traffic was circumstantial though: Google Analytics only tracks referral site traffic. As More and more people use a desktop or mobile applications, most of the visits from people clicking on Twitter-ed links are registered as “direct traffic”, and not originating from Twitter. Quid?

Now the mystery is solved, thanks to bit.ly, the URL shortener I use for all my Tweets. Bit.ly always tracked the clicks per link. Via their website you could track exactly that: the clicks per link, which looked like this:

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“Content is King” is one of the most important slogans for serious bloggers: No matter how well you promote your blog, if your content – what and how your write – is mediocre, people might discover your blog, but won’t come back. Good, original content is key.

It also works the other way round: you can write the best content but if people don’t discover your blog, you will be writing in a void. There is nothing as frustrating for a blogger than to write a fantastic post, … and see nobody reads it.

Here are the basic promotion techniques I use each time I publish a blog post:

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You created your blog, and write posts, write posts, write posts… Gradually, your audience grows. You get comments, get other bloggers linking to you,… Your blog has a lift-off. But how much of a lift-off? Are you flying in orbit, or are you barely clearing the tree tops? How do you measure your blog’s performance. How do you keep track of it?

Success is in the eye of the beholder

What means “success” to you? Are you writing for a selective public? Then reaching those handful would mean accomplishment for you. Are your goals accomplished having created a small working community around your project blog? Good for you. Or are you already happy just to have a medium where you can post stuff, and can refer to if you get questions about your organisation? Ride on!

But.. if you are a main stream blogger, you will need more than that. You will want more than just a handful of visitors per day. You will want more than one comment per week. What tools are around to keep track of how well you are doing?

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I posted before about how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog, and illustrated the principle with a simple case study.

TechCrunch, a hugely popular resource for us webgeeks, just published interesting statistics about the impact of their Tweets onto their main website traffic.

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