Planning: A content audit (slacking: 2 of 3)

With the first in the series, Recycling: A Mid-Summers Night’s Writers Block (aka Strategic Planning) – 1 of 3 out of the way, I have continued to sift through content and metrics to see what was of interest and what wasn’t.  Sorta a Win-Loss analysis for content.

Analyzing Context and Content

There are lot’s of things to look at – content and links which was the main focus of my effort until a couple of days ago was actual posts – keywords, visitors and page views.  The main reason I started a comment review was to understand what conversations were where from a content perspective, since a recent comment from Marty Thompson was on a boring event post, which I wouldn’t have thought would get a comment.

Prior to Marty‘s comment a couple of days ago I wouldn’t have thought about reviewing comments.  Spinning through the comments ended up being a fun as part of the work so far, some really good feedback from a bunch of people including, but not limited to, the following:

Looking at conversations and content proved to be not just fun, but informative.  Not sure I have any conclusions, at least I have some data points, like the Duomo post which caused a conversation in real life today, a question on Facebook and a comment from Tessa – another cool person you should read.    The other thing I’ve found thanks to auditing comments is that there is a significant variety of content over the past two years – like random content.

Random Content Rules!

Maybe not, but oddly enough random posts are among the top post here.  The best example of  random content is still my first thanksgiving post which gets a good deal of random traffic on terms like “Funny things to be Thankful For“, most of these people appear to load at 1 other page – I think.   My biggest bounce page is on Geographic Topics for blogging, none of the topics which I think anyone posted on, but it does garner the most amount of spam comments for some reason.   The remaining top 5 terms in search are:

While the top five keyword pages here are randoms, Product Management and Marketing is creeping up with both PM & Social Media and Brands in the top 10.   It’s movement of product management content and brand into the search terms which is nice to see, since this one the strategic roadmap theme over the last year – focus more.

Corner Cases: Content of Interest

After looking at all the content, nearly 500 posts, I find that the content I like writing is not always the most interesting to others and the comments, page views and links prove this out.   While the data recommends otherwise, music and setlists are still going to be randoming into the blog, plus  leadership and career oriented content since these are things I like and have appeared to be sustainable.  Here are examples of some leadership and career posts:

Net-Net

Blogging for the past two years has been an interesting meander and after reviewing the convesations I have a significantly different view on what is valuable and what is not.     I really think everyone with a blog should invest some time looking at the progress, content and conversations over time and put a plan in place based on what you learned.

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1 Comment

  • Reply jon gatrell July 21, 2009 at 11:20 am

    Planning: A content audit (slacking: 2 of 3): With the first in the series, Recycling: A Mid-Summers Night’s Wri.. http://bit.ly/1Uckw

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