Toluu

The Viral Garden

Bloggers; Know thy trafficJanuary 1

I absolutely obsess over my blog's traffic. Not so much the actual numbers, but I want to know where the traffic is coming from. Can you name the top referring site to your blog? You should be able to.

By watching my traffic like a hawk, I can get a better idea of what content is resonating with my readers, AND where those readers are coming from. Case in point, here is my monthly Sitemeter traffic for 2008:



Now notice two things. Notice there was a big spike in traffic in June and July, then another in November and December. The first spike happened due to my using Plurk(which I joined in June), and linking to new posts from there. I was heavy into Plurk for a couple of months, then my usage scaled back. Around October or so I started using Twitter much more, and sure enough, there's a traffic spike in November and December. The two most active months ever for me on Twitter? You guessed it, November and December.

But I wouldn't have noticed that Plurk and Twitter were big sources of traffic for my blog if I hadn't closely examined my traffic referrals via SiteMeter and Google Analytics. After seeing which site

This is why the 'authority matters' argument is total BSDecember 30 2008

Over the past few days, the usual suspects/A-Listers drug back out the tired old argument that the size of your network equals 'influence' in the social media space. One of them said that they wanted to be able to search by 'authority'(followers) on Twitter, and implied that followers=influence on Twitter.

Here's an example of why this thinking is not only archaic, but dead wrong when it comes to social media.

On Friday night I got off Twitter for a couple of hours. When I got back to the computer, the first thing I did was check my blog's traffic, which I always keep a close eye on.

Now you have to remember that this was the Friday after Christmas. I had 79 visitors on Christmas day, so I would expect for my traffic on the day after Christmas to be a bit higher, but not by much.

When I checked it on Friday, I found that I had 126 visitors....in the previous HOUR!

What had happened? A couple of people had tweeted a link to this post I wrote last week on building your followers/subscribers, and then it snowballed. Over the next 24 hours, I found several times where it had been retweeted. And of all the people that retweeted it, I only found 2 that had more than 2,000 followers.

Now here's the key; the 'authority matter

How I got a gazillion blog subscribers and thousands of Twitter followersDecember 23 2008

I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was going to tone my blog posting down for the rest of the year, as I usually do around the last week of each year. But I came across a blogger that had written a couple of recent blog posts, one about how he had recently added hundreds of blog subscribers, and another about how he had added hundreds of Twitter followers. The main thrust of his advice was to get more subscribers by commenting on highly-trafficked blogs. And he says you get more Twitter followers by following Twitter users with a lot of followers, and replying to them.

Is he wrong? I would say his methods would work, at least in the short-term. But the idea that you 'have to target the influencers' is SO 2005.

Here is what I did; Instead of targeting 'influencers', I targeted smart people. I could care less if they had 2 readers, or 20 when I found their blog. I started reading them because they were smart, and made me smarter for having read them. They are people that write compelling content, that create value for others, and that are motivated by being part of a larger community than themselves, not in drawing attention to themselves. And then I tell you to go read them as well.

This is how you gain subscribers and Twitter followers; you follow people smarter than you are, and you point other people toward these smart people. That is it. These people make YOU smarter, which means you create more VALUABLE conten

Who's going to clean up this mess?December 14 2008

It's funny because lately a lot of the topics I post about here have already been hashed out on Twitter, and sometimes it feels like everything's already been said by the time it gets here. Which is exactly how I'm feeling about the latest Twitterstorm that hit yesterday.

On December 2nd, Chris Brogan wrote a sponsored post about KMart on his Dad-o-matic blog. As part of the post, Chris got a $500 gift card to go on a shopping spree in KMart, in exchange for blogging his experience. He also got another $500 gift card to giveaway to readers of the Dad-o-matic blog. Chris explains that he brought his kids along to pick out toys during the shopping spree, and donated those toys to Toys For Tots.

Again, that was on December 2nd. Yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang found the post, and shared it with his 16K or so Twitter followers. And just like that, the latest Twitterstorm was born(BTW why do these 'controversies' always seem to pop up on the weekend?). If you w

Companies; Should you outsource your social media initiatives?December 11 2008

My friend Vickie emailed an interesting article from CRMBuyer that discussed the future of social media for business. It sees great growth in social media spending by businesses, citing a Forrester Research claim that social media spending by businesses will top $4.6 billion by 2013.

The article also claims that many businesses simply don't have the available resources to launch social media initiatives, and will probably have to outsource this function. I won't disagree with this, and also won't disagree with the article's claim that for the average company, using social media in the near future "seems a nearly unavoidable business necessity".

However, while outsourcing might be necessary for the near-term, I would encourage companies to make every effort NOW to get up to speed on using social media sites and tools themselves. If knowing how to communicate with your customers via social media will become a necessary business function moving forward, then it's only logical that such businesses should make moves NOW to put themselves in