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The web is a place for connection and wonder. But it is also a place for measurements, lots of measurements. With all the numbers flying around our heads, web and social analytics tools used to make me throw my arms up in the air. They can tally:

how many followers, favourites and RTs you get on Twitter
how many unique visitors find your blogs and the conversion rates of your business sites
how many Facebook likes, comments and friends you have
how many Facebook page fans you gathered
how many likes and reblogs you earned on Tumblr
and on and on. You get the idea.

From our deep need to be liked springs the desire to make these numbers go up, up and up. Always. Even though it shouldn’t, my heart sinks a little when my Klout score goes down. And I feel better when I get new followers on Twitter or Google Plus.

We tie our worth to these numbers. We know it’s reductive and inaccurate but we do it anyway. It’s complicated because we can’t dismiss these metrics in bulk.

Choose the right metrics or do not watch them at all

As we mindlessly obsess about them, we find ourselves trying to please everybody. Broadening and broadening our scope until it doesn’t make sense any more. Of course, we need some of these numbers. They can tell us where to direct our efforts better. However, we need to direct our attention to the right ones.

Standard reports from tools such as Google Analytics give us every number imaginable. It’s so confusing. We focus on the numbers that are easy to understand like monthly unique visitors and conversion rates.

Paying attention to the wrong metric is worse than not following any. If you track the wrong number, you’ll take all the wrong actions. Gerry McGovern explains it best in this article about an e-commerce site that connects sellers to customers. They focused on attracting more sellers and failed to focus on their customers. Of course, it didn’t increase sales or leads. Lead generation and consumer satisfaction aren’t easy to measure but, according to Gerry McGovern, trying harder to measure what matters makes a world of difference.

Hence, if you’re not going to take the time to learn how to pay attention to the right metrics, you might as well leave your analytics tool behind. People starting out on Twitter and on blogs out of personal interest need not worry about them. If you want to embark on a journey of learning, there are a few actions to take.

Measure basic website health

There are basic steps you can take to gauge the health of your website. Avinash Kaushik, who is the world’s most respected authority on web analytics, distills his wisdom and experience on his blog. Unmissable articles are clearly labelled as such and linked from the footer.

In the first unmissable he details the 10 steps he advocates you apply to any website. I would suggest you read his long post and take all the steps one by one. However, here are the gems that most probably apply to bloggers and social media enthusiasts like us.

Traffic sources show you where your visitors come from. According to him, you should have diverse sources: search engines, other sites linking to you, and direct visits should all be well represented. Social media sites are big drivers of traffic as well. Pay attention at how much traffic comes from Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest, and Paper.li to see which of the services brings you more value.
Visitor loyalty is important for many bloggers. Our audiences may be small but we pride ourselves on keeping them engaged. The percentage of returning visitors is where most people look for information about engagement. Unfortunately, ratios are bad because they’re volatile and, hence, unreliable. Instead, look at visit frequency and recency which measure how many times visitors returned and how many days have elapsed between their two last visits. You should also take a look at the visit’s length. Again, avoid the average and watch the detailed report.
Ever wonder which of your topics resonate with your audience the most? Keyword clouds will give you hints. Lists of the 10 most-used keywords to find your site are dull and looking at them too much may make you shoot for the common denominator in your audience instead of breaking it down to serve it better. Instead, go the keywords page of your analytics tool, export the raw data and paste it into Wordle. It will give you a great visualization of what your audience is looking for and found on your site.

These pieces of information constitute a great stepping stone to make you enter the exciting world of analytics. They may prompt you to take actions or, at least, ask yourself relevant questions and investigate further. Happy analysis!

Image credits: Detail from The proportions of men and their secret numbers, 1533 woodcut.

I wrote « Get Started With Web Analytics Without Throwing Your Arms Up » on Paper.li’s blog, it was originally published on July 26, 2012. Reproduced here with permission.

How do you ensure your content flows continuously? Publishing around current events, seasons and holidays are a great place to start. News organizations are masters at this. No example shines brighter than the month of December. Year after year, they run stories about Christmas decorations. More recently, they’ve put a “green” spin to it by focusing on LED technology and energy savings. Later they cover snow storms and how they make trains run late. Then, there are sales in the stores. It’s the same in all Christendom!

You can do the same by using recurring events to generate ideas and create flow within your content streams. All it takes is a list of relevant events, some thinking and planning to create content that is both relevant to your audience and to the event. Unlike TV channels and newspapers whose content must always fill the same containers, online publications are more agile. However, publishing content that’s both good and relevant remains a challenge. Using recurring events, your publication efforts can be organized and you can start to orchestrate relevant story arcs that your audience will care about. Your ideas will flow! Populating your editorial calendar is bound to become a breeze.

What Type Of Event?

Look for near-global events like Christmas or Easter to begin populating your calendar. Don’t forget to turn to more local ones as well. Both can be very handy. For example, in Geneva (Switzerland), we have an official chestnut tree near the parliament hall. The secretary of the parliament, as part of her job, reports the blooming of the first bud. This first leaf marks the official beginning of spring in the state of Geneva and this event is covered by local news every single year.

All the examples above focus on mainstream news. You shouldn’t limit yourself to their events, however. Dig around your organisation and the online communities you’re part of. Be as specific as you can because each online community and organisation has their own pulse. You will be sure to find many events relevant to your niche. In particular, pay attention to:

Industry-specific online celebrations such as Social Media Day or Ada Lovelace Day.
Anniversaries and birthdays related to your industry’s leading companies and people,
Trade shows,
Conferences,
Awards,
Earning reports release dates,
and Product release dates.

How To Connect Events And Content?

Choosing relevant events is always best. However, they don’t have to be tied to the themes you cover. Get creative! It’s all a matter of finding the right angle to connect events and content.

Lifehacker — the productivity blog from Gawker Media — specializes in tips and how-tos. For a number of years now, the week of Halloween triggers Lifehacker’s Evil Week. It has become an awaited rendez-vous and fans get excited about it. Myself included. They create or repurpose content with an evil twist, so you can protect yourself (that’s their claim!). For example, in 2012, they talked about:

Another example of successful cyclical content from Lifehacker is their yearly post “The Best Time to Buy Anything in 2012” which works so well that they have a canonical version they pledged to keep updated.

More niche communities also have their special moments. In the web design community, the «24 ways to impress your friends» advent calendar publishes great articles about cutting edge techniques. They’re geeky treats which aren’t always practical to use day to day because of poor browser support or industry standards. The period of the advent works great to make an event out of this content’s publication and gather the audience around it.

Even when the connection between the content and the events is far-fetched, it can still work. Tying together relevant content and getting it to your audience in a timely fashion is the ultimate goal.

Hit Or Miss

No one can guarantee your first efforts will be a success and you will have to resort to trial and error to get the mix right. Define success metrics in order to decide which initiatives to push and which ones to abandon.

Unfortunately, some content-event couples will simply not work or the content will prove too complicated to craft. Lifehacker tried a lot of combinations. In 2010, they held a Spring Cleaning Week, for example. It didn’t happen again in 2011 or in 2012. In fact, at the end of 2010, Nick Denton from Gawker Media moved the company away from yearly programming to a TV style weekly schedule. He said:

themes will be moved to a programming grid which owes more to TV than to magazines. For instance, Lifehacker’s personal finance coverage is popular with both readers and advertisers; like much of our more helpful content it is often lost in the blog flow. From next year, it will be showcased at a regular time, say Fridays at 3pm, a personal finance hour.

Pack your calendar full of relevant events: yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly. Reflect on how best to cover them and launch experiments. Adapt and repackage your content. If it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to abandon some events.

Be Reasonable

Very few have the resources to imitate Gawker’s hour-by-hour programming. Small teams or single-authors shouldn’t tire themselves trying to keep up with publishing powerhouses. Anyway, most of us don’t need to publish such high volumes of content.

However, publishing content tuned to the daily memes of your social media platforms of choice can do wonders. If you have a column about wine, think about publishing it on Wednesdays to take advantage of Twitter’s #WineWednesday.

By observing weekly rhythms and attaching corresponding hashtags to your tweets, you can widen your reach. Wine is just an example. Mashable published a list of Twitter’s daily memes such as #MusicMonday and #ThankfulThursday.

Start small! Go back to the basics and commit to #FollowFriday, for example. Tweet about what makes each person you follow worth following and add a #FollowFriday hashtag. One or two additional tweets a week is easy to put out and will represent a useful service to your followers. Such recommendations have reach and they are already content.

Using seasons and memes to plan your content can make your publishing life a lot easier. Start researching upcoming and recurring events in your area and “park” them in your editorial calendar. Oh, and once your content plan is in place, don’t forget to actually write the articles!

I wrote « Wrap Your Content Around Regular Events » on the Paper.li blog, it was originally published on February 25, 2013. Reproduced here with permission.