Six Month Evaluation: The State of the Blog Post
- May 21st, 2007 /
We’ve now been blogging at VoodooVentures.com for just over six months, and we felt like it was time to check in and assess the state of our blog. It’s been a lot of fun sharing our thoughts with you on a daily and weekly basis. As things have progressed, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves and you, our readers, and we are excited to continue to improve moving forward.
First let’s start with some stats:
- 129 posts – an average of 1 post every 1.7 days
- 90 Comments – the most comments was 12 on the Shopping 2.0 Smackdown post
- 40 community members from MyBlogLog
- 9739 visits and 21447 pageviews from Google Analytics data
- We have 35 subscribers through FeedBurner and the truth is we don’t know how many through our natural feed
- Our Alexa Rank is 213,851 and has been as high as 90,000
The most popular posts have been:
- My Top 10 Wows About Zappos – 1/29/07
- Do You Smile Over the Phone? Zappos Does – 1/26/07
- Basecamp vs. Dropsend Valuation Smackdown - 11/27/06
- Shopping 2.0 Smackdown: Shopping Engines Compared – 12/8/06
- Live Collaboration Nirvana = Skype + Yugma – 3/1/07
The least popular posts were:
- What’s Wal-Mart Up To? – 2/6/07
- Dropping Vowels is So 5 Minutes Ago. Am I in 3.0? – 11/3/06
- EO: Accelerating the Entreprenuer – 11/3/06
- Update: siteMighty Beta Testing – 12/7/06
- Transparent is the New Opaque with Quigo – 2/26/07
Finally, shout outs to our biggest readers and commenters:
In digesting all of this, some trends start to arise. We see that some of the topics on which we think we were breaking news should be left to the journalists, and that we should instead shoot for posts in which we have a unique perspective or an authoritative review. In other words, do we really have something to contribute to the conversation?
Later this week we’ll be posting about our plans going forward. While changes to our blogging will be incremental, we hope that they will continue to improve the quality of our content and engage our readers more effectively.
Here’s a preview of the questions we are asking ourselves:
- Do I have a unique perspective with value to add or am I bouncing around the echo chamber of the blogosphere?
- How does this forward our strategic goals as a company?
- Would I gain something from this post if I read it elsewhere?
We also want to hear from you, our readers. We’d love to hear what you like and what you don’t like about our blog. We really appreciate all the commenting that many of you do as our goal is always to keep the conversation going. Now is the perfect time for you to tell us what you like and what you don’t as we evaluate our own performance.
Let us know, and don’t pull any punches!
Thanks, The Voodoo Ventures Team
Random Posts
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May 22, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Those are some tough questions, and for the most part will be great precursors to publishing a post. Don’t let those answers hold you back too much though.
Did you know the top 5 posts would be the most popular before you published them?
May 23, 2007 at 11:38 am
You guys seem to have a good overall blogspective on a lot of key issues in the industry. For the most part your site is well blogged, Id say. If I was a professor in Blogonomics 101, I would give you a solid B+. One suggestion I would have as a return blog viewer is to try and run updates on previous blogs. For example, you never filled us in on how the Netflix thing worked out for you, or updated us on the C v B challenge. A man much wiser than me once told me “A blog is still a blog even if its blogging on something youve blogged on before.” Anyway, keep up the good work. BLOG ON!
May 25, 2007 at 6:08 am
Thanks for your comments guys.
Gerard, really good point, that is true, of course we didn’t know what would be popular before we published it. I hope we’re not being to hard on ourselves or hold us back. It is all about creativity and our self expression of ideas.
Frank, I agree, we do need to follow up on our ongoing themes. In fact, I have to write part two to this post, about our blog strategy moving forward. A B+ isn’t too bad for our first 6 months, and we’ll be shooting for the A+ in the next 6 months.
Chris
May 29, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Thanks for the shout out Chris!
I really appreciate your posts about running and building your product and company.
May 30, 2007 at 8:25 am
Scott thanks for your comment! Look for more fresh content and follow up soon. Thanks for being a loyal reader!
Chris
Jun 12, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Voodoo Ventures - Idea Fuel Blog : Blog Archive : State of the Blog Part 2. - Where we’re going says:
[...] A few weeks ago I posted a State of the Blog post, where I highlighted traffic stats about our most successful and least successful posts over the last six months. The goal in doing this was to evaluate our performance with the Idea Fuel blog, and ascertain what we are writing that is engaging our readers, and what is just fluff. [...]