Search Powered by:
Landing on Long-term Value
When talking about the benefits of business blogging, one of the points I make in my seminars is that unlike traditional advertising (that ends when you stop paying for the ad), a blog gets more and more valuable over time…
A great example of this smacked me in the face a few minutes ago as I was playing around in Google Analytics. When looking at the pages that people enter the site through, of course the main page is #1… But what surprised me was that only two article out of the next 10 were written in July of this month.
This tells me that unless visitors are coming through the front-page, they are almost definitely going to articles that one of us wrote long-ago. And when you look at the top posts, who would have guessed that articles about removing popcorn ceiling, serendipitous advice for people moving to Seattle, or the closure of a local mortgage company would be some of the top drivers months (if not years!) after they were written.
Probably the craziest part about blogging for business is that you really have to accept the fact that you are not in complete control. My guess is that Ardell could point you to 10 articles that she thinks would be more valuable to the typical real estate consumer than her article on removing popcorn from a ceiling, but she is not in control of the search engine algorithms that drive a majority of the traffic to our blogs… Just as I’m not. (Although that doesn’t mean we can’t try out best to influence those rankings! 
)
One final thought… Earlier this month, there was some buzz about a WP plugin that gives new arrivals a different message than people who’ve been to the site many times… Joel gave a decent plug for it and Jim went so far as to install it. Like Greg, I was hesitant to jump on this solution because of it’s one size-fits-all nature.
However, what do people think of us going back to the articles that are legitimately good landing pages and providing “updates” that send people to other interested parts of RCG? In other words, if someone lands on the article about “moving to seattle”, then I go back and make sure to point them to all the different neighborhood articles we have… Similar things could be done for “home renovation” or “mortgage” articles… My rationality is that as long as we’re providing additional information that readers of that article may find helpful, we’re not doing anything wrong, but it seems a bit suspicious to simply target articles for updates based on traffic (but then again, maybe that is the only rational method to use!)… Does this seem devious to other people?
Posted: July 17th, 2007 under Technology.
Tags: blogs, long-term, real-estate, seo, traffic
About the Author: Dustin Luther
- Author's website: http://4realz.net/
- More posts by Dustin
- Email the author
Comments
2.
Comment
from Dustin
Time July 17, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I hear you with the plug-in, but, for better or worse, I find the recommendations at the bottom of your posts too easy to skip over… (but I’m a bad test case since I’ve seen them so many times!) I’m thinking that if it was more manual and the “recommendations” were part of the post it would actually be more effective.
3.
Comment
from ARDELL
Time July 17, 2007 at 11:49 pm
I don’t think I’d like some plug-in robot recommending “similar articles” at the bottom of my articles.
Would you value the stats as much if you spoon fed bait to other articles?
Can you explain first generation tags vs…? And I was wondering what you thought of the value of widgets. We don’t have any, unless I don’t know what a widget is.
I added one for Inman today. I used to have it awhile back. Sometimes I add widgets just to play with the code in my sidebar to practice code manipulation.
4.
Comment
from Dustin
Time July 17, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Ardell, at one point, I feel comfortable saying that RCG had more widgets than any other real estate site! (Galen went so far as to make fun of me for hacking my theme to include four columns so I could fit more widgets!)
But over the past two years, I’ve slowly been weaning RCG off of widgets because they are often quite distracting. We’re now down to five core elements that I think are most important on the sidepanel (site search, home search, contributors, comments and links!). Nonetheless, I’m always open to suggestions if you’d like to see something else!
5.
Comment
from Jim Duncan
Time July 18, 2007 at 2:34 am
This is one plugin that I toyed with installing; it highlights on the page the search terms that brought the visitor by, but it doesn’t give links to other articles. I’ve had reasonable success with the What Would Seth Godin do plugin, primarily because a lot of my readers aren’t RSS users, and this gives them the email option. Several have told me that they would read more often, but they forget to visit or they don’t visit their bookmarks that often. It’s a fairly simply plugin, but it’s worked so far.
That said, I’m always looking for something better.
6.
Comment
from Galen
Time July 18, 2007 at 8:16 am
I really like RCG right now and Dustin is right, I sort of lightly poked fun at Dustin for adding even more columns on the main page. I was also quite impressed: I had never seen 4 columns or quite so many plugins on a web page before.
Jim, I’ve ended up on sites with that pluggin and I like it. It’s unobtrusive to normal users, but gets you right to the point if you came from a search. Install away!
7.
Comment
from Christina Ethridge
Time July 18, 2007 at 9:32 am
I like the idea of a plugin plugging in more relevant content you’ve written since a particular post. I think it sounds like it would serve clients and readers very well to have that.
8.
Comment
from Rhonda Porter
Time July 18, 2007 at 9:57 am
I wish I could figure out how to get Google Analytics to work with my Typepad blog. ARGH! I just know enough techie stuff to be barely dangerous.
9.
Comment
from Dustin
Time July 18, 2007 at 9:57 am
I agree Christina… And based on Greg, Jim and Galen’s comments, I have an idea I’m going to play around with…
10.
Comment
from Geoff Green
Time July 18, 2007 at 9:59 am
Blogs are all about information. If you have identified an area of interest then I see nothing wrong with expanding that area via article updates, links etc. It’s all about providing what people want.
11.
Comment
from Dustin
Time July 18, 2007 at 10:02 am
Rhonda,
I’ve never used Typepad, so I can’t be much help… What have you tried? Is there a help for Typepad that might give direction?
I can’t offer up his services, but Anil (who left comment #6 on this post) is Typepad’s outreach guru and is going to be at SF Connect… I’m sure it is a common enough issue that he (or someone similar) could direct you to a good resource.
12.
Comment
from Rhonda Porter
Time July 18, 2007 at 10:16 am
I signed up for Google Analytics from one of your previous posts…and ran stumbling blocks right away…and then I became busy with closings so setting this up went on a back burner. I do have a help ticket from Typepad that I’ll revisit and perhaps, I’ll pay a visit to Anil, too! Thanks, Dustin!
13.
Comment
from Dustin
Time July 18, 2007 at 10:29 am
Geoff and all… It seems that my concern for going back and re-editing popular articles to send traffic to the places I want them to go is not shared by most of the people around here… which is great news.
Ardell: Do you want to run an experiment with me? I’ll go ahead and update the “moving to seattle” article… What do you think about editing the popcorn ceiling removal article to add an “update” to the bottom of the post… Something like: “UPDATE: If you’re looking for home renovation tips and ideas, especially for homes in the Seattle area… You should check out these articles: article 1, article 2, article 3″.
Most of this thread has been talking about an automated process, but I think we’ll get the most bang for our buck if we do this manually on the articles that attract considerable google traffic!
14.
Comment
from Deborah Burns
Time July 18, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Rhonda, I have Typepad also and had trouble trying to figure out how to install Google Analytics as well…so no analysis for me at my blog either! Maybe whoever figures it out first can tutor?
15.
Pingback
from Dustin has a post on Long Tail Blogging — The Real Estate Blog Watch
Time July 18, 2007 at 1:40 pm
[...] Dustin has a post on Long Tail Blogging. I can agree with that whole heartedly. On the Real Estate Bloggers the past week had 1500 different posts that are visited. Think of that, 1500 different reasons people come to my site in a given day through the assorted search engines. [...]
16.
Comment
from Tom
Time July 18, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Dustin,
Have you tried the relate links plug-in? It works very well for increasing page views, but can be quirky to install on the newest wordpress. It does help drive traffic to other posts.
Great post on the long tail. It is amazing to look at after a while.
17.
Pingback
from Have another cookie? Targeting content to two different kinds of first-time visitors to a WordPress.org weblog | BloodhoundBlog: Real estate marketing and technology blog | Realtors and real estate, mortgages, lending, investments
Time July 19, 2007 at 6:05 am
[...] Dustin had a post last night that made me rethink the ideas I posted the other day on using a cookie to modify a WordPress.org weblog’s default behavior for first-time visitors. [...]
1. Comment from Greg Swann
Time July 17, 2007 at 11:24 pm
I think that’s Amazon service, which is a laudable Web 2.0 goal. There is a “related posts” plug-in that we use. There’s another plug-in out there that does exactly what you’re looking for — uses the reader’s search keyword to recommend similar posts.