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< You cannot escape technical jargon | Guest Posts |
This is a guest post from Rebecca Leaman. She writes on nonprofit technology and web 2.0 topics for the Wild Apricot Blog, and doubles as 'Jen/domestika' at Domestik Goddess and on the Authority Blogger forum.
I’ve been test-driving Woopra this week, and re-reading the novels of Ernest Hemingway. Strange, how two such different activities can join to teach a key lesson in writing web content that travels — those blog posts that people go out of their way to share.
Woopra is a real-time site stats program with what I’d consider a needlessly complex interface for most bloggers’ purposes; and it’s dangerously addictive, so I probably won’t continue to use it for long. But there is a very cool feature: “tagged visitors.” After someone comments on your blog, his subsequent visits are tagged with his name, rather than Visitor #1897 or such.
It feels a bit voyeuristic, to identify individual visitors without so much as a Whois lookup. But it also makes it easy to distinguish between the actions of two very different types of visitors.
On the one blog I’ve got Woopra-enabled, visitors who found it through a search engine results page (SERP) showed a 94% bounce rate, <1% rate of return visits, and an average page view of 1.2 with less than 20 seconds on site. Granted, a one-week trial is hardly scientific — but it was the comparison with tagged visitors that really made a lightbulb come on for me: Tagged visitors to the blog, on average, checked in 3 times during the week, and averaged 3.2 minutes and 6.7 page views each time.
Those numbers aren’t a great surprise — after all, SERPs traffic tends to be people on a mission to solve a specific problem; maybe they find their answer on your blog, or they don’t, but either way they usually click on through. And that’s dandy, if your blogging goal is to get a high volume of traffic onto your site and off again by way of a high-CTR advertisement.
But what if you’re trying to build a community of loyal readers, to establish yourself and your site as a go-to expert resource on your niche topic, or to promote your own products, skills and professional services with your blog?
Search engine visitors are unlikely to stop their search long enough to truly engage with your writing. A focused seeker doesn’t have time (or motivation) to Digg your post, share it in Google Reader or on Facebook, StumbleUpon it, Mixx it, Sphinn it, or bookmark in del.icio.us, annotate it with Diigo, tweet it on Twitter or promote on Plurk, feed the RSS to countless other sites, or link back to it in a blog post… unless you can draw them in on that very first visit, and make a real connection.
That’s where Hemingway comes in.
The man’s been dead for almost 5 decades now, yet his books still sell across the world. Several were published after his death, in fact — including Islands in the Stream, the novel I stayed up late last night to finish, despite a very limited interest in hunting WWII submarines off the coast of Cuba. And then there were the films and television adaptations…
That, my friends, is content that travels.
Just google Hemingway: in those SERPs, you’ll see countless references to his rules for writing (as interpreted by CopyBlogger) and the famous 6-word short story :
For sale: baby shoes, never used.
Hemingway’s emphasis on tight, to-the-point prose fits right in with the much-repeated advice on how to blog, doesn’t it? You know the drill: 250-500 words per post, sprinkled with high-demand keywords, typographical emphasis (headings, bold, italics, etc.) on keywords, repeat as often as possible to keep search engines crawling your site in expectation of fresh content… and that advice still holds, for the most part.
But tight prose doesn’t have to mean a short post. The old 250-500 word count rule was based on the needs of search engines, not on human preferences. This may be Web 2.0 but we are only just starting to let go of the idea that posts must be bite-sized to travel. In fact, more often, the opposite is true.
Take a moment and delve into the popular social bookmark sites. Aside from the breaking news stories, what’s been saved and stumbled most often? Check your own site stats and see which of your posts rank high for referrals by a direct link or social media site. You may be surprised…
Start with a story worth telling, grab your reader in the first few lines, and keep it moving along. Yes, do keep in mind the keywords that will help searchers find your post in the first place (because the travelling has to start somewhere!) and please, yes, do break up a long page of solid text into small chunks that are easy on the eyes. It all helps to invite the visitor to pause and read.
In the end, however, content will only travel if it pays its own way — if the reader comes away feeling that he’s had good value for the time invested.
Hemingway knew that, just as thoroughly as he knew deep-sea fishing, hard drinking, and the torments of genius. And I’ll bet a cold mojito that your blog analytics will tell the same story.
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