How will you know if you’re progressing as a blogger? Well, you could get someone to monitor your writing and tell you if you’re improving or you could watch your statistics to see if your readership grows. One good method of doing that is by using Google Analytics. That’s where Eva Bui and Ellie Morrow step in, they presented a really useful session about SEO and promoting your blog at the National Book Bloggers Forum 2014. They are the Random House Australia’s digital gurus.

The initial main points about Google Analytics are that it is:

• Free
• Easy to implement
• Easy to use
• Easy to understand

They didn’t go through installing the product as they assumed everyone already had it or could figure that out but that is also fairly easy. You’ll need a gmail account for this and once you’ve got one you go to this page and follow the prompts, it will give you some code and ask you put it in your header so it can follow everything, a task that is also really easy.

Google Analytics Audience Overview

This is their slide with some stats. When you look at it on the page it’ll be slightly differently arranged, they’ve just made it presentable. Compare sessions with users. That will tell you if they’re reading multiple pages. Yep, that includes doing something called ‘maths’. Be aware people using WordPress.com  as opposed to WordPress.org will not be able to install it.

Bounce rate too high? Insert more links to take people further into your blog. If the reader is logged into their gmail account while reading your blog, their visits will show up as ‘not provided’ giving them some measure of anonymity.

Google Trends

You can use Google Trends to help you find the keywords currently trending and get more readers that way. If you happen to be reading a current book I’d certainly suggest doing this to ensure you use the keywords people are looking for.

They suggested we ramp up the content about books and other gift ideas just before celebratory days such as Father’s Day. Not sure why they mentioned Father’s Day when the bulk of the book bloggers are female, we had one solitary male there that day and most of the presenters were also female. I think there’s an article screaming to be written there.

Community – Facebook, Twitter et al

• Make sure to tell your community to click and share, don’t assume they’ll do this automatically.
• Use strong calls to action such as ‘share this’, ‘grab your copy’.
• Lists grab people’s attention, be sure to put ‘top ten’ in the subject.
• Create evergreen posts, articles you can reuse in future times.
• Ask questions: best book of the year; what they’re reading.
• Facebook insights show when your community are online, it’s good to share content during that time.
• Facebook likes are good but audience interaction is better, the more audience interaction you’ve got the better you’ll do.
• Find out what Facebook posts have the top interaction, learn and create similar content.
• Facebook Analytics is also good for combatting Facebook’s tendency to filter your posts

Schedules

Write up a monthly schedule, then break that down into weekly. Include what you’re going to blog about but also what you’re going to say on social media. If you want to be spontaneous you don’t need to plan every single word but just plan the gist of it.

Useful Resources

jeffbullas.com

mashable.com

econsultancy.com

digitalsherpa.com/blog/

insidefacebook.com

blog.kissmetrics.com

Compiling this article has been an interesting journey. I knew I’d never manage to remember everything so I checked Twitter. Like most people in the room I was on Twitter, taking notes and tweeting my thoughts using the hashtag #NBBF14. I went to the hashtag using TweetBinder to find all the tweets and crib from them. Most of the tweets I used were my own as I was tweeting not just for my memory but for other people, others tended to tweet how they were loving the content which is great to tell people how good it is but doesn’t give much help when compiling an article such as this. Thank you to those whose tweets I’ve cribbed, I’ve lost track of who they were but I’m sure you know.

I’m not quite sure how I’m going to put some of this into play as there’s a lot of pre-planning involved and I tend to write off-the-cuff but I’ll give some of it a try.