Why I Spy On You

Anyone can write a blog.

Some people are very good at it.

Others can’t even come up with an interesting tweet.

Does it matter?

If you’re on a podium and there’s no audience, what’s the point?

I count my lucky stars because I have an audience and it has grown ever since I started blogging. It’s not entirely due to luck though, because I do my very best to make your visit as enjoyable and memorable as possible. 

Before I tell you about the visible and often invisible ways in which I do that, I’d like to share four goals with you that are always at the back of my mind when I blog:

1. write compelling content
2. engage my readers
3. increase my reach and readership
4. become rich and famous

As you can see, one thing leads to the other. Quality content stimulates readers to like, repost, retweet and comment. This increases my reach and grows my readership. And if I play my cards right, the world will fall in love with me and make me a wealthy man.

Yeah. Right.

Seriously, in order to accomplish all these goals there’s one thing I need to do:

I have to stop thinking about myself.

There’s only one person that really matters.

Yes, it’s YOU!

What  I want to write about is not that important. It matters what you want to read. Even though I’m not a psychic, I have a pretty good idea what you are interested in. Just look at the list of Popular Posts in the upper right-hand corner. Not only does it provide some social proof; we can learn something from this list. 

WHAT’S POPULAR 

Based on the headlines, only 4 out of 10 articles have to do with my profession: providing voice-overs with a European sound. I often use a voice actor’s lens as a springboard to write about things that concern all kinds of freelancers. My list of popular posts proves that this is a good way to increase my reach beyond the small voice-over community.

There’s something else I monitor closely on my blog, and that’s the level of engagement. Some posts get more comments, retweets and likes than others. Look at this list:

This definitely confirms a trend because most comments have little to do with voice-over related topics. They are about freelancing, running a business, social media, marketing and money.

Not only do I know what my readers are interested in, I can tell you that most of them live in the United States, followed by Great Britain, Canada and The Netherlands.  What I particularly like is that I have a nice mix of returning readers and people who stop by for the very first time. It’s great to have loyal fans and I love to welcome new friends!

I can also tell you how most people find me. Here are the results from the last few weeks:

And where do most referrals come from?

These stats are very useful, not only because they help me understand my readers better. They tell me how effective my blog promotion is, and where there’s room for improvement.

Looking at the statistics, I also learned that an increasing number of people are reading this on a portable device (mostly iPhones). Based on that, I totally redesigned my website to make it mobile responsive (see: The New Nethervoice). That alone has dramatically influenced my bounce rate.

Bounce rate is usually defined as:

The percentage of visitors who see just one page on your website and the percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less). 

It might look great on paper to have thousands of people come to your website, but if they’re gone in a few seconds, what good does that do? Currently, the bounce rate for nethervoice.com is 1.98%. For mobile users, my bounce rate is even lower: 0.34%. Get this: my old site had an average bounce rate of 40-60 percent!

Looking at the most recent numbers, I can tell you that people spend about 3 minutes and 47 seconds on my site (mobile users: 4:21). That’s pretty good, considering the fact that the average visit to a website lasts less than a minute and often no more than 10-20 seconds!

Where do I find all these factoids? I find them on Google Analytics and with the help of a number of WordPress plugins such as the Site Stats on Jetpack and SlimStat. Keep in mind that we’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to web traffic analysis. I can drill down on individual web pages and blog posts and get a fairly good idea of what my visitors are up to. I even know what some of them do when they leave…

SHARING THE LOVE

Readers often share my content by copying and pasting it to emails and social media. How do I know? I use a nifty tool called Tynt to monitor what content anonymously leaves this site. Go ahead, copy and paste something from this page and see what happens!

Each time someone pastes content from my site, Tynt automatically adds a url-link back to the source. When that link is clicked, the user is directed to this blog and can see the original article. This increases traffic to my site. 

Tynt is one more way to measure traffic and engagement. Like other analytics tools, Tynt tells me which keywords were used to bring visitors to my site and which content prompted people to take action. Thanks to Tynt I now know that most people use email and Facebook to share my stories.

The nice thing is: with all these tools at my disposal, I have a way to measure results; not just for this blog but for my entire site.

STAY WITH ME 

As you just saw, most visitors spend almost four minutes on this site and something tells me this might have to do with the content. But there are other things I do to try to keep you from leaving. One simple way is to instruct WordPress how to handle outbound links. 

An outbound link is a word, phrase or image that you can click on, that will take you to a new website. As you can see, if a word or a phrase appears in blue on my blog, it’s an outbound link or an internal link.

 Here’s how I created the link above in WordPress:

If I don’t check the box Open a link in new window/tab, the reader will leave my website once the link is clicked, and may never come back. By ticking that box, the outbound link opens in a new window while leaving my page open, and the reader can return to it whenever he or she done. 

You’ve probably also noticed that I often refer to earlier articles in this blog. Whenever I do, I make sure to create an internal link to those stories. Not only is this a service to readers who want to find out more about a certain topic, it tends to increase the time people spend on my site. And by the way, I don’t only do this for my blog. My entire site is filled with internal links.

From an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standpoint, internal links are invaluable. They become the threads holding the spiderweb together that is nethervoice.com. Search engine robots (sometimes called spiders), use these links to find content for indexing. A web marketing specialist from Japan put it as follows:

If one webpage links to another, it can be thought of as a vote for the linked webpage. Therefore, the more credibility a webpage has that links to another, the better it is for the linked webpage. 

There’s one other thing I like to do to keep you here just a bit longer. At the end of most blog posts, you’ll find a link to the next article. 

Readers have told me that they stumbled upon one of my stories by accident, and then just kept on flipping the virtual pages from link to link. Every click is a YES from a visitor; a mini-endorsement increasing the site’s credibility.

Perceived credibility is one of the factors influencing the page rank of a website. Contributing to that credibility is social behavior. The more people link, like, pin, repost, and retweet a page, the more relevant search engines believe it is.

Don’t assume that your visitors will take action, though. You have to make it easy for them to share content. That’s why you find share and like buttons at the top and bottom of my stories. Secondly, it helps to ask people to take action:

Be sweet. Please retweet!

Those four words have increased the number of retweets by sixty percent!

Now, there’s a reason why I put that request at the end of a blog post, just as I added the phrase:

“If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!“

When people are finished reading a story, they’ve had an experience, and hopefully, it’s been a good one. Ideally, I want my readers to say:

“I want more of where that came from!”

or

“My friends need to read this.”

At that point they’re most likely to take action.

One of those actions can be to subscribe to this blog or to leave a comment.

HAVE YOUR SAY

If you’re a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that my blog roll is gone. In its place you’ll find the last five comments posted on this blog. There are a few reasons I made that decision.

Most importantly, very few people ever clicked on the links in the blog roll. That’s another thing Google Analytics told me. Secondly, not everybody on my blog roll was an active blogger and I didn’t feel like checking these blogs for fresh content every week. 

Why link to recent comments instead? Well, I want to encourage and reward reader participation. My most active friends and fans deserve to be featured more prominently. Having a blog just isn’t enough anymore to appear on this page. 

Once you post a comment, you’ll notice something else that’s new. I’m not going to tell you what it is. You’ll have to find out for yourself. 

SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATION

The last thing you might have seen is the Find us and like us on Facebook box I added a few weeks ago. You don’t have to leave this site to like me on Facebook, and you can see the faces of other “likers” as well. It will only display those “likers” that are already in your Facebook network. This creates a sense of community, and people are more likely to click “like” if they see the faces of friends. 

What I really hope is that you will click that button because you enjoy spending some time on this blog and you want to connect with me. This blog is published once a week. I update my Facebook page almost every day. It’s another place where we can be among friends and fellow-professionals and share useful information and ideas.

THE REAL SPY

As I have demonstrated, I’ve been keeping a close eye on you. Yes, I spied! But while I was writing this article, it did occur to me that the tables have turned. By sharing some of my hidden statistics with you, you were able to spy on me!

The truth is: I have no secrets. When it comes to blogging, I am an open book. In fact, that book is for sale. It’s called “Boosting Your Business with a Blog” and you can buy the unlimited PDF version right here on this website.

In it, I talk about creating compelling content, I teach you how to make your blog easy to read and I show you how to build an audience.

Please help me reach my fourth goal and buy this book today. It will be an enriching experience for both of us!

Paul Strikwerda ©nethervoice

Be sweet. Please retweet.

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