The Blog Studio

For years, The Blog Studio has sat near the top of Google’s results for “blog design”. Not only was our home page keyword rich, but we had a ton of incoming links, and we’ve been doing this for longer than 95% of the rest of our little industry. Recently though, we’ve slipped off the first page.

I think the drop in position was timed with our redesign. One of my goals was to reduce the number of words on the home page. I wanted to let the video and the work speak for itself. In retrospect that might have been a bad decision. Looking at the folks who have taken over “our” position on the search results, the thing that is most obvious is that they have a LOT of written content on their home page. I’ve made some adjustments to the home page to lengthen the post excerpts, and rejigged the layout slightly.

As of today, we’re the 13th result for “blog design” on google. I’m going to give Google a few days to see if this change has any effect. I will, of course, report my findings!

Crazy Egg has been around for a while, but I’ve only just got around to trying it. I had trouble taking anything with such a silly name seriously, to my own chagrin.

Crazy Egg is a stats package unlike any other you’ve used. It offers a visual overview of your site activity, showing (amongst other things) the number of clicks per link on a page.

This is incredibly useful. It allows you to immediately grasp what your readers are doing. Are they clicking where you want? Are they reading your whole page? Is one graphic over powering another? Is your site doing what it’s supposed to do? The site itself says

What do the results tell me?

Where your visitors are clicking speaks for itself.

Here are just a few things you can discover:

• Find the right spot for your ads


• Find the right layout for a page


• Find the right place to put everything

Crazy Egg’s admin interface is amongst the best in the business. It’s intuitive, powerful, and easy on the eyes. The actual software making the thing run is extremely impressive. The page updates happen using javascript, meaning there is very little refreshing of the web page you’re looking at. This gives the site more of a desktop application feel. Very slick.

Cost for the service ranges from $0 to $99/mo, depending on volume. Currently, I’m playing with the free account, but can see upgrading in the near future to access some of the more advanced features. If you’re interested in making sure your site is doing what you want it to do, I highly recommend checking Crazy Egg out. Now, if only they’d do something about that name…

I’m listening to William Gibson talking to Cory Doctorow about innovation, the cost of retail space, and the limiting opportunities that exist for micro-brands to reach street-level audiences in our ever more expensive cities.

Their point is of course valid. I know only too well how the cost of retail space can force bankruptcy on an otherwise healthy business. But I’m surprised that neither Gibson or Doctorow brought up the nearly zero cost involved with setting up a storefront online.

Yes, I can already hear you saying “but online is no match for street level retail when it comes to selling local micro-brands”. But frankly, that’s outdated thinking. Instead, I’d ask “why are you still thinking of geographic markets when you could be thinking of social markets?”

I’m working on a couple of fashion related projects at the moment (three of them actually), and as such have been immersed in the world of online style for a couple of months. During this period, my mind has been blown time and again by sites like stylehive.com, notcot.org, etsy.com and others. These sites allow the tiniest of micro-brands to flourish. The pyramidical model of social networks allows these micro-brands to reach markets far faster and for far lest cost than by setting up a retail storefront. If, as a micro-brand owner, you can get a social influencer to buy and recommend your product, you have instant legitimacy within a wider market.

So it isn’t true that skyrocketing retail costs are killing the micro-brand. It is true that the skill set needed to succeed at small level retail has changed dramatically. But that’s a story for another post.

Lorelle put out the call last week: what are your blogging goals for 2007. I’m a total hypocrite when it comes to my own blogs. Almost every day, I talk about, work with, and think through my client’s business and blogging goals. But my own? I just kind of wing it…

No more! Here then are my goals concerning this blog for 2007:

1. Go with the flow. Interest, motivation, energy, and available time are all cyclical. Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it’s not. I’m not going to stress about it.
2. Build traffic in a linear way, all year long. Target goals is 1000 unique visits per day.
3. Build subscriber numbers. Target goals is 1000 subscribers.
4. Increase average page views.  We’re currently at about 3 views per visitor. It will be interesting to see if the new design elements we’re introducing will increase that number.
5. Get Lucia and Mike to post more. You reading this you two?
6. Rank in the top 20 in Yahoo for our keywords. We’re currently #3 on Google, #19 on MSN, and not even in the top 100 on yahoo. To quickly find out your ranking, use this great free search engine ranking tool.
7. Increase the number of comments we receive. Again, I’m hoping the design changes we’re rolling out will help this.
8. Increase Technorati rank to +5000 (currently 7351)
9. Have our new and improved free 18 page Guide to Business Blogging downloaded more than 5000 times (coming extremely soon)
10. Keep this fun!

This list focuses on metrics, since they are easier to track and tell if one is on target or not. In all honestly, numbers don’t really get me all that excited. Making connections with people does. That’s hard to put into specific goal terms though. So I’m using numbers as indicators of the effect those numbers will create.

What are your blogging goals for 2007?

I read a great article over the weekend by Paul Beelen, titled Advertising 2.0. The article is a must read for those in the media, marketing and advertising industry. It explains the way technology is changing business.

The article has so many great points that I would love to just copy and paste but I’ll give a brief overview, however I recommend that you read the full article.

It gives an explanation on how companies have been perceived to know more then their consumers and due to technology and the growth of weblogs, wikis, podcast and videocast… consumers are tapping into the web for knowledge of products and services by other consumers – making decisions based on product/service analysis rather then media influences.

A great deal of the content informs ad agencies on how they need to adapt to technologies changes. Information such as:

• how they talk to consumers (talking with them, not at them)


• how to communicate with specific smaller target audiences rather then larger target groups


• to approach ads with a public relations approach rather then the tradition ad agency approach


• Not faking it – how consumers no longer accept artificial channels of communication.

The article also covers other key factors such as:

• how mobile technology is changing the way people receive information


• advertising on the web


• RSS (really simple syndication) and how it effects distribution of mass media


• the effects of technology on newspapers and other global contact distributions.

I applaud Paul at doing such a great job on breaking down all these key factors into a simple, easy to follow document that appeals to multiple levels of tech savvy individuals or those that are not tech savvy at all.