All For You by Brian Keith

My Aunt knows that when I am not blogging, I must be very busy, and she thinks maybe she should call to check in on me…

Some of the things I’ve had my fingers in:

1. Coldheat recently launched a Heated Pet Bed. Too bad they don’t give us free samples… If I actually liked my housemate’s cat, then I would buy the small version.

2. I can’t talk about what we are doing for momAgenda because it is super secret. I can tell you that Nina is blogging more and just added a few new people to her blog.

3. Exciting things are happening for a number of clients behind the scenes… I will have a lot of things to blog about in April.

4. We are bringing on new people. Sara does copywriting. Michelle is our new Senior Account Manager.

5. And lastly Ian keeps reminding me why I work for him, like when he recently doubled sales for a client by reducing download speed… it is the small things that matter.

At some point I will get back to blogging more, and reading more blogs, and my Aunt can rest easier knowing her favorite nephew is doing just fine.

Geekout time:

1. Launchy- http://www.launchy.net. Lets you launch applications from a simple ALT-Space command line. Saves time.

2. Does a blog matter? Use http://technorati.com/search/http://www.blogaddress.com and find out.

Now if Launchy could input data into spreadsheets from a command line…

Here are the stats I use when I send a basic report to a SEO client:

1. Organic traffic- how much traffic from all search engines
2. Total traffic- from all sources
3. Organic traffic across engines- Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
4. Average page views across engines- same three- this is the average numbers of views per visitor.
5. Rankings- same three engines. This looks at both branded keywords (the company’s name and their product names) and unbranded keywords

I drew numbers from September 2006 to February 2007 so we can see what is seasonal and what is a real trend.

The kinds of things I highlight:
1. Increase in average page views per visitor: this is big. An increase from 3 page views on average to 4 page views on average, when your site sees a medium volume of traffic, indicates that you are drawing significantly more relevant traffic. More relevant traffic equals more people buying your things.

2. Rankings: getting on the top three pages of Google means you are closer to striking distance of page one. Getting to the bottom of page one means you are in striking distance of being above the fold. And so on.

3. Overall traffic: traffic increases across engines shows that our SEO is having an impact. SEO takes months and years to get the very highest results in competitive industries, like the bridal industry. Showing a 15% increase in overall traffic over 6 months (reduces effect of seasonality) shows that we are having a measurable impact.

There are hundreds of important analytics measurements; these are the 5 that mattered most to me in this report.

We just launched Fred Janssen’s new site at http://www.fredjanssen.com.

Fred is a management consultant who sticks around for as long as he is needed, then moves on:

“Consider me your temporary COO. I work with you and your team to achieve the goals you’ve set for your business.”

And, as you can see on Fred’s homepage, Ian hired Fred to work with Portent, and Ian is one happy customer.

David says in the comments on my post about media production:
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I too am much better at consuming. But I wish that wasn’t the case - I believe that in many cases it is much more gratifying to create than consume.

Next step? A top 10 list of media creation life-hacks, right? Streamlining the process of creating quality content and media - and I do not even know where to start…

Connecting my WordPress installation with my Flickr and YouTube account was a good move.

Any ideas?
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Who do I know who produces a lot of media? Jeremiah and Jennifer, for a start.

I produce little media other than emails, and a lot of good ideas on that are from Merlin.

With 163 views, and 69 people reading the feed, today was the highest viewing day so far.

Why? A significant factor was me leaving a trackback on Seth’s blog, but that does not explain the majority of traffic:

You can see here that in the referrer logs, 1/3 of the referrals came from Seth. The next 4 referrers count for the next third of traffic, and all the posts that got one or two people referred account for the last third.

Look at the number of views for each post:

Here is the long tail in action. It says that one popular item can be outshown by a bunch of less popular items. The lesson is to have a LOT of content- on your blog, on your site, in your online store. And search engines like lots of relevant content as well.

Though now that I have hit 163 views and 69 feed subscribers, the next step is to a) move to moveable type and get google analytics installed and b) beat that personal record.

Party on, Garth.