Blog Building: A Modest Success to BlogBuild Upon

A good three months ago, we set off on a course to build the readership of this blog. We talked about the methods we’d use to do so, and we set ourselves some goals to let us know if we were having any luck. And because we figure some of you may be trying to do something similar with your own blogs, we nervously decided we’d do the whole thing live and without a net, in front of all of you, so you could gain wisdom from our successes and failures. Why not?, we figured. After all, if it works, we’ll look like geniuses, and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll be exactly where we started, with only a few folks reading our blog to know we didn’t do so well.

So how did we do, and what should we do from here? For those of you interested in this kind of navel-gazing, follow the link for an update…

Let’s consider our six original goals in turn:

1. Our first goal was simply to increase our onsite audience, and we are proud to report that the number of unique visitors who viewed our blog more than once was well over our goal of 1,000 (if our web analytics are to be believed). It’s also satisfying to look back at earlier posts to see the general upward trend of views-per-post. So one goal met --- good for us!

2. In terms of offsite audience growth --- that is, those of you who hear about our latest blog posts via your RSS readers --- well, we’re going to call that one a win as well, even though we may not be exactly at 100. It looks like 24 of you have us included in RSS reads from the popular Bloglines aggregator, and another 46 of you access using RSS via Google Reader. Let’s throw in those of you who are alerted via email through the blog’s own subscription service (40), and throw in a chance few who may be accessing us through RSS feeds other than Bloglines and Google Reader…et voila! Another goal reached.

3. Our third goal related to what is known as the “conversation factor” --- that is, what kind of discussions or comments are our posts generating? We did ourselves a favor in making our goal nice and ambiguous, stating simply that “more comments would be nice.”  While it’s certainly true that we’ve had more comments in the last three months than previously, there is still not a whole lot of conversatin’ going on in our comments section. We don’t think that this means we’re being ignored; we like to think you’re finding some good stuff here, then moving immediately forward to make use of it in your lives and businesses. Still, some of the comments that we have received have added practical insights or raised important points, and we’d like to continue to try to tap the experiences of our readers by thinking of ways to engender further comments on our posts.

In a positive sign that could also be included in the conversation factor, we saw a notable increase in the number of posts emailed to others. Maybe you didn’t know this, but when you see something on our blog that you think a colleague would be interested in, and you click the “Send” link to forward the post to that person’s email, we get a note about that. And over the last three months, there have been quite a few more emails sent. It’s hard to know what category this fits into, but there’s no doubt it increases awareness of the blog.

4. In terms of a “ripple index” --- other blogs referring to posts they’ve found useful on our own blog --- we’ve made less than a splash. We did enjoy a couple of successes. For example, this post generated a relatively whopping 42 blog reactions; this post made its way to a personal Internet fave ResourceShelf, and was also referred to in the newsletter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. However, we fell decidedly short of our goal here. We’re hoping this is more a matter of switching the order of cart and horse, and that each additional success will geometrically increase notice of our little blog, and that we’ll then see these numbers rise as well.

5. As for our return-on-investment metric, well…let’s keep in mind that this wasn’t a goal so much as a measure for people interested in gauging for themselves what kind of time commitment a blog-building endeavor would require. The short answer is: a lot more time than we thought it might. Bear in mind that it’s important to keep updating your blog with the usual fare, so any deliberate blog building that you’ll try to do must take time over and above your typical blogging time allotment. It’s impossible to say which of our tactics may have had the biggest bang for our time-investment buck, but the tactic with the biggest time investment is certainly the social media tools mix. Look for more details there in a separate post…

6. Finally, our non-quantifiable goal: we wanted our blog to help those of you who tune in to make more informed decisions for your businesses, either through resources we point to on our blog or resources otherwise available through the Hill Library. We hope this has been the case, and if we see continued interest in the blog, we’ll assume that means you’re finding us of some use

One of our favorite comments during this initiative mentioned an additional benefit to our blog-building efforts, and it’s one worth keeping in mind for others maintaining your own business blogs: “Don’t forget to just have fun with your blog too. If nothing else, it will keep you more current with new media trends. I have been blogging for about two years now, and even though it is a release mechanism for me, we are just now seeing some business benefits…after nearly 800 posts.” Keeping up with new media trends? Check and check. Release mechanism? Check. And it’s encouraging to know that we don’t have to feel too bad if our slim 170 posts in ten months haven’t yet made us the new YouTube

Now what next? Well, we have a few ideas that we hope will engage our current readers and spark new interest among prospective readers. But we’ll also keep plugging away with the plans that got us this far: recruit the occasional guest blogger, adding ourselves to blog directories, commenting on other similar blogs. But most of all, passing along keen resources whenever and wherever we can turn them up.

So thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed our experiment. Feel free to pass along your own experiences, thoughts, recommendations, or other, in the comments. They’re good for more than just our conversation factor.