Blog Survey Lessons

I'm monitoring our survey results from the BB31 Day 20 Challenge (Survey Your Readers). Here's what we've learned so far:

• We need to be posting at least every few days - and nearly half of you would prefer daily posts
  
• I could be an interior decorator in a future life - you all like our current color scheme! (I'll have to let my boyfriend know, whose comments were less than complimentary during his first-time reader audit)
  
• We need to tag (or label, as Blogger calls it) our posts
  

One additional note: It's great that Blogger now offers a survey widget, but there's not a lot of flexibility in it for non-techies like us. We would have loved to put a Blogger survey in a post or in our sidebar, but aesthetically it just wasn't working. We ended up going with a link to a SurveyMonkey survey instead. Anyone have any advice for future survey taking?
Thanks!

Better Blog Challenge - Day 20

We're a little behind in our Better Blog Challenge assignments, so I took some time today to accomplish Day 20's task, which is to run a reader survey about my blog. As Darren notes, the best way to enhance and build your blog is to hear from the readers themselves. Our short, 5 question survey includes questions raised from our Day 2 challenge of running a first time reader audit.

Please, take a minute (literally, only one minute!) and take our survey. Your feedback is important to the enhancement of our blog!

31 Day Challenge - Being a Statistician

Today our task is to analyze our blog's statistics; through Google Analytics, we have the ability to examine all sorts of data, including the number of hits our blog receives, the popularity of certain posts over others, where our readers are coming from, etc.

What I learned from our stats:

• Our number of daily visits has grown exponentially since our blog first started. Duh. Although this may sound quite obvious, it is always good to know that we aren't blogging to an audience consisting solely of our 3 member blog team. Also, knowing we have a growing list of visitors will only encourage us to blog more consistently and have our content be useful and engaging.
  

• Most visitors are referred from our organization's website, although being a part of the Better Blog 31 Day Challenge has resulted in a large number of referrals from other blogs, especially Michele Martin's The Bamboo Project. Other large referral sources are the Google search engine and Blogger.com.
  

• Our bounce rate is embarrassingly high, and I'm not sure why this is, as I have perused Darren Rowse's tips for making your blog more "sticky" and we already follow most of his recommendations. For those not down with the blogosphere lingo, a bounce rate tracks how many people arrive at our blog and then leave right away without viewing much. Lower bounce rates are better. So, in order to decrease this stat, we need to make our blog more "sticky," i.e. do something differently in order to keep readers hooked on our blog. Perhaps I could follow Darren's advice to break our longer posts into series of posts. Also, as discussed at length in our Day 6 task, we should really try to make our blog more interactive and less like a news feed.

Although my day-to-day work centers more around with people who have a nicotine addiction, this particular task might just have brought a new form of addiction to my attention: I spent roughly two hours playing around with our Google Analytics stats...

31 Day Experiment - Day 6

Our task for Day 6 of the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Challenge is to e-mail an "old timer reader." As Darren Rowse (the creator of the challenge) explains,

"Do you have readers that have been reading your blog since the ‘early days’ of your blogging? You know the ones, they’ve been commenting and contributing away to the point where they’ve almost become part of a the scenery on your blog.

These readers play a big part in making your blog what it is. Their comments are actually content that is being added to your blog, their involvement brings a sense of community and makes it a more vibrant place and their input adds to the knowledge base of your blog."

Despite our blog's young age of six months, Liz and I figured we have a few "old timer readers" who have been with us since the good ol' days of early 2007, and we could at least e-mail them and thank them for sticking with us. And then we encountered our first big challenge of the BB31 challenge: Darren referred to "old timers" as those folks whose comments have become the scenery of the blog, and who are consistently commenting and bringing a sense of community to the blog. Unfortunately, we were at a loss - we just don't have anyone like that. Liz went back and counted and we only have 26 comments on our blog TOTAL, 9 of which were written by Liz and Jennie.

So we started brainstorming/asking why this could be. We were able to separate our questions into two different categories: 1-how we treat the blog and 2-how our readers view the blog.

1st, questions that relate to how we treat and use the blog:

• Are we not giving our readers enough opportunity to comment or share their opinions?
• Are we neglecting to ask our readers what they think?
  
• Are we valuing our output to the point where we make our readers feel there's no room for input?
• Does our blog resemble a recorded message rather than a live conversation?

2nd, questions that relate to how our readers treat and use the blog:

• Do our readers see the blog as an additional and more-frequently updated information source, rather than a forum to offer their opinions?
• Has our blog become like the bi-weekly conference calls we hold to update our partners, where SFW does a lot of talking and other partners do a lot of listening?
• Are our readers giving blogs a first try with us?
• We think what we're doing with our blog is pretty revolutionary in the tobacco control world - could it be that most of our readers who work in tobacco control are timid about jumping in?
• Are half of our readers Big Tobacco spies?
• Seriously Big Tobacco, we know you're watching...

There are many more questions on our list, but these were some of the ones we decided we wanted to answer most. So now a plea to our readers - let us know, what do you think about commenting on our blog? Do you view this blog as a place where smoke-free supporters in WI can exchange ideas openly? If you're shy and don't want to let us know in the comments section, feel free to drop us an e-mail.

SmokeFree's 31 Day Experiment...

It's hard to believe we've been blogging since February! (I guess this calls for a six-month anniversary.) Amber, Jennie, and I have been talking lately about how to make our blog better and more helpful to you, our readers.

A recent post on Michele Martin's blog, The Bamboo Project, came at just the right time. She's taking up Darren Rowse's "31 Days to Building a Better Blog 2007" challenge and she challenged her readers/fellow bloggers to do the same. There are 3 goals of the experiment, 2 of which we're interested in here at SmokeFree Wisconsin:

• finding readers
• building community/keeping readers (this one's for you, folks)
  
• monetizing a blog (this is the one we won't be paying much attention to)

I have to admit I wasn't sure if this challenge was right for us at first, but after reading what other bloggers (like Laura Whitehead from the U.K.) are saying about the challenge, I think there's a real potential for us to improve the way our blog serves our readers' interests.

So, here we go! (And for all you silent lurkers out there, please use this month as an excuse to leave us a comment or send us an e-mail!)