Questions for weekend pondering | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 10:05 am – February 4, 2012 by Larry @ The Skilled Investor

This is my opinion and it might be a bit odd-ball. I have a half dozen personal finance sites. Comments are open and get approved with moderation on only one site where I publish the Carnival of Financial Planning, when publication is not rotating out to other PF bloggers to publish. On that one site, I approve comments and link backs when other bloggers link in. (A plugin auto checks for the inbound link.)

Long ago the flood of spam comments turned me off so much that I was not going to waste my time trudging through the mud. (Yes, I used spam filter plugins, but they only screened out the bulk of the spam.)

I do have comments open one other product sales site, because rarely visitors miss the contact form and submit a comment about a product. Comments are never approved, but I capture their questions and emails addresses and respond to their questions about the products via email.

Across all my PF sites, my target readers overwhelmingly come from search engines — disproportionately from Google. I look at stats to see both the search terms are being used, search term volume, and the page of entry. These must be my "readers." My oldest website, which is at the domain root of The Skilled Investor is a creaky old XOOPs CMS system that I rarely touch any more. However, it does gives me cumulative lifetime counts of readers, so I know the total who have hit one page versus another page.

In summary, I infer from analytics

a) what my readers are most interested in and/or

b) what articles bubbled up high enough in the SERPs to get traffic.

In addition, a lot of social traffic shows up, but long ago I realized that they are just surfers. If social surfers like the content, fine. However, I reached the conclusion that search engine traffic was focused traffic that might care about what I wrote. In addition, a small fraction of search traffic might buy a product or click an ad. I doubt that social surfers ever click ads or buy products. Thus, I ignore the numbers from social sites.

Larry @ The Skilled Investor said:

This is my opinion and it might be a bit odd-ball. I have a half dozen personal finance sites. Comments are open and get approved with moderation on only one site where I publish the Carnival of Financial Planning, when publication is not rotating out to other PF bloggers to publish. On that one site, I approve comments and link backs when other bloggers link in. (A plugin auto checks for the inbound link.)

Long ago the flood of spam comments turned me off so much that I was not going to waste my time trudging through the mud. (Yes, I used spam filter plugins, but they only screened out the bulk of the spam.)

I do have comments open one other product sales site, because rarely visitors miss the contact form and submit a comment about a product. Comments are never approved, but I capture their questions and emails addresses and respond to their questions about the products via email.

Across all my PF sites, my target readers overwhelmingly come from search engines — disproportionately from Google. I look at stats to see both the search terms are being used, search term volume, and the page of entry. These must be my "readers." My oldest website, which is at the domain root of The Skilled Investor is a creaky old XOOPs CMS system that I rarely touch any more. However, it does gives me cumulative lifetime counts of readers, so I know the total who have hit one page versus another page.

In summary, I infer from analytics

a) what my readers are most interested in and/or

b) what articles bubbled up high enough in the SERPs to get traffic.

In addition, a lot of social traffic shows up, but long ago I realized that they are just surfers. If social surfers like the content, fine. However, I reached the conclusion that search engine traffic was focused traffic that might care about what I wrote. In addition, a small fraction of search traffic might buy a product or click an ad. I doubt that social surfers ever click ads or buy products. Thus, I ignore the numbers from social sites.

Larry you are much more seasoned blogger than me. You know a lot more. But do you mean, the one off search engine visitors are your readers? If they are readers what information you have on them? 

See where I am coming from is..The Simple dollar readers are generally too frugal types, where as GRS readers are more diverse in nature. Ramit Sethi's readers are not in to all out saving, they prefer earning more to save than reducing cost.

Day after day their readers come and read their blog posts. Do you happen to have that clear readership choice known to you?

If I count one off search engine visitors as readers then I don't need to think about them while writing, no matter what you wrte, search engine visitors would come by.

OneCentAtatime said:

Larry @ The Skilled Investor said:

[NOTE: I cut out my long message from above and just included OnCentAtatimes question.]

Larry you are much more seasoned blogger than me. You know a lot more. But do you mean, the one off search engine visitors are your readers? If they are readers what information you have on them? 

See where I am coming from is..The Simple dollar readers are generally too frugal types, where as GRS readers are more diverse in nature. Ramit Sethi's readers are not in to all out saving, they prefer earning more to save than reducing cost.

Day after day their readers come and read their blog posts. Do you happen to have that clear readership choice known to you?

 

If I count one off search engine visitors as readers then I don't need to think about them while writing, no matter what you write, search engine visitors would come by.

Several years ago, I orchestrated an email group of about 20 bloggers — most of whomwere in personal finance. (One of the nice things about stumbling across Yakezie recently is that similar activity is far better organized with this website and the group is much larger.)

With this little group of bloggers we tried various things that were cooperative in nature regarding social sites, and the conclusion I reached through all that activity was that you could spend endless hours trying to push up your social traffic, but there was no financial case for doing so. On the contrary, search engine traffic seemed to be focused and motivated to proactively seek out certain information that was implied by their search engine queries. It also seemed that searchers had a much greater tendency to click ads.

I reached these conclusions not because I could parse the search engine versus social traffic on a site with both kinds of traffic, but because I had some niche keyword structured personal finance sites that rarely got social traffic. (e.g. Alexa ranks in the millions.) Nevertheless, those keyword sites with limited social traffic yielded Adsense revenues significantly out of proportion to the ratio of traffic compared to much higher traffic sites with mixed search engine and social traffic. (To be real, the per site Adsense revenues might buy a cheap lunch, but once running I rarely had to tend the niche sites again.)

You said that "The Simple dollar readers are generally too frugal types, where as GRS readers are more diverse in nature. Ramit Sethi's readers are not in to all out saving, they prefer earning more to save than reducing cost." and maybe that characterizes their readers because that is the subject that they stick to when they write. However, your original question was something like how do you "know" who your readers are. I only know through inference from the analytics that I mentioned.

I write what I write (usually focused on investments), because that is what I want to write or because I have already written something for a client and it does not take much time to generalize it and re-purpose it for the web. I am not trying to build a regular readership as a primary web activity. If visitors come back, that is fine, but it is not the focus. (That said, I do try to build a mailing list with a free ebook giveaway and a newsletter. However, the longer term purpose there is for product sales.)

I do not agree with the idea that "I don't need to think about them (search engine visitors) while writing, no matter what you write, search engine visitors would come by." Search engines are brainless and have absolutely no semantic understanding of any content. They just parse, compare, correlate, and index text strings using algorithms with incredible complexity. Search algorithm complexity is driven by the endless gaming activities of webmasters to claw their way to the top of the SERPs. Getting to the top of the SERPs means more traffic and more money. If you ignore keywords, you ignore probably the most financially lucrative segment of your visitors.

If a blogger just writes whatever comes to mind without paying attention to the search terms that people use to find information, then they are far less likely to be found via search engines. Thus, a blogger then only has "regular" readers who probably never click an ad and never support the blogger financially. Unless the blogger has a product to promote and can get their regular readers to buy it, there is no business model for blogging. Virtually all visitors think content is free, because it is. Makes it hard to pay the rent.

Therefore, for everything I am going to post to the web, I do a quick and dirty 5 to 10 minute keyword analysis on the Adwords keywords tool. Many times I find that there are equivalent 2, 3, and 4 word keyword strings with ten times the search traffic when compared to the words that I would use instinctively when I write. I am conscious of the keywords that I include in the post title, because these are the anchor text links back to the post that will influence SERP rankings.

Therefore, I use the terms that more people tend to type as search queries, because if I do not use those words, then my post is far less likely to show up in the SERPs were anyone will find it. Being keyword conscious does not guarantee high rankings, but ignoring keyword data means staying in the weeds with less search traffic and less money.

Hope this second try at an answer was more clear.

Funancials said:

I remember checking Alexa a while back which tried to explain my audience demographic.

 

Based on internet averages, funancials.biz is visited more frequently by users who are in the age range 25-34, have no children, are college educated and browse this site from home.

 

I'm assuming mostly chicks visit my site. 

This is your visitor's profile Hunter, not readers'…

I'm not really sure what you're getting at.  There's no way to know for certain what each person who reads your site is like.  There are ways to try to gauge that, but none of them are precise.  I could say that many of my readers are well educated, because when I post about grad school most of the responses are from other people who are in, have completed, or are thinking of starting grad school.  That wouldn't necessarily be the right conclusion, though, because someone who hasn't been to college may not connect with that particular post and may choose not to comment.  I could make assumptions based on the subjects of my posts which have received the most page views, but those are generally the ones I have submitted to carnivals, asked people to stumble, tweeted, and generally promoted more than the others.  The additional page views aren't from "regular readers" but from people who clicked a link and then largely forgot about the site afterward.

My point is that there's no precise way to figure it out, so people are giving you methods that they use to try to estimate it.  No one's claiming that their suggestion will get the true measure of who their readers are. 

I suppose you could do a survey, but then most people probably wouldn't respond unless there was an incentive, in which case you would likely get people who enter every online contest and that would skew your results.

My answer is based purely on my humble opinion (not stats or anything else quantitative or qualitative): 

I figured if my subscription base is growing, people read me and like what they read. Otherwise what's the point of subscribing, right? I never try to guess what my readers like because it is a really difficult thing to do. You cannot please everyone and write what you think they would like to hear. They came to read YOU. So, I'd keep writing what inspires and matters to YOU. 

Another thought is to evaluate the time-on-site statistics. For example, Awstats will tell you how long a visitor stayed on site. I tend to ignore an traffic under two minutes, which is the bulk of the traffic. If someone is to be a reader, they need to have time to read. For example, you could look at end of month statistics over time and count the number of people who spent more than five minutes on site. Those are readers. Then remember that the actual number is probably smaller, because some are return visitors.

This is a better approach that RSS counts and list subscriber counts, because you have no idea how engaged RSS and list subscribers are. Some people sign up for RSS feeds and lists and never pay attention thereafter.

Larry @ The Skilled Investor said:

Another thought is to evaluate the time-on-site statistics. For example, Awstats will tell you how long a visitor stayed on site. I tend to ignore an traffic under two minutes, which is the bulk of the traffic. If someone is to be a reader, they need to have time to read. For example, you could look at end of month statistics over time and count the number of people who spent more than five minutes on site. Those are readers. Then remember that the actual number is probably smaller, because some are return visitors.

This is a better approach that RSS counts and list subscriber counts, because you have no idea how engaged RSS and list subscribers are. Some people sign up for RSS feeds and lists and never pay attention thereafter.

I am perfect example at that. 100s of blogs on my rss, I never open rss, I rather visit the blogs I like frequently.

Average is derived Suba! Yeah, looking for / is a good idea.