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...

$653,600

$653,600. Over half a million dollars. In the past 6 months, that's how much Big Tobacco has spent lobbying Wisconsin legislators behind closed doors in their attempt to kill anti-tobacco legislation and budget measures in our state.

• Phillip Morris - $309,353 - read the lobby report here
• R.J. Reynolds - $304,708 - read the lobby report here
• UST (U.S. Tobacco) - $39,572 - read the lobby report here

This amount represents a huge increase over what Big Tobacco spent over the same period last Budget season ($259,101). What do you think - has Big Tobacco chosen Wisconsin as its next battleground?

Vote in Our Poll: Last Chance!

Our poll on "What is the Tavern League Talking About?" closes tomorrow, so don't forget to let us know what you think of when you hear "adult-only."