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Recapping 2008 and the 2009 Game Plan

Kyle James — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:30:50 +0000

It’s taken me a little longer than I would have liked to get around to it, but I very much believe in looking back to review the past year and setting goals going forward. You do the same for your website and professional growth right? If not or even if you do hopefully you can get a few ideas from the notes below. Also leave a comment with any good suggestions for appraisal metrics that you use below.

2008 Recap by the Numbers

39,536 unique visitors
196 Blog Posts
1,200+ Comments
55,000+ Spam Comments caught by Akismet
600+ Subscribers
10,000+ Backlinks according to Yahoo! Site Explorer
Visitors from 154 Countries/Territories
Traffic from 829 sites – Top 5
1. StumbleUpon
2. Google – (Non Search)
3. Twitter
4. BlogHighEd
5. Social network
14,853 visits by Search Engines (over 93% from Google)
9,855 different keywords in those visits (talk about long tail)
370+ blog reactions on Technorati (I think that means that many blog posts linked to .eduGuru)

2008 Recap Results

When I first started this blog in January 2008 it was a one man shop. This site has come a long way so let’s look at some of those things.

From a staff of one to six writers
Inaugural member of BlogHighEd
Presentations and coverages at major High Ed Web Conferences including eduWeb, HighEdWeb and Stamats
Helped hundreds of readers network with each other
Launched Guru Gear

I’m sure there are lots of smaller details, but all in all what a wonderful and extremely successful 2008 for this site! Oh how could I forget this blog had a big impact in helping me get my new job at HubSpot!

Goals for 2009

So what do we hope to accomplish in 2009? Well lots of wonderful things but here are some exciting things to look forward in the coming year.

At least 200 posts in 2009
Redesigned site with easier access to the archives of excellent posts
Increased networking opportunity – we haven’t fully flushed out all the details, but in 2009 it is a goal to provide better ways to help our readers network with each other
More Social – along with better networking we would like to make the site more socially active and new ways to engage readers
More Presentations – We have a dream of every staff member presenting at a conference this year! So if you are planning to attend a Higher Education conference in 2009 hopefully you will get the opportunity to meet at least one of our excellent writers.
3,000 readers – Getting the ball rolling was the hard part. With six times the staff now we see no reason why we can’t grow our readership six fold.
Impact your daily work – at the end of the day this is why we write. Knowing that something you read on this site influenced your decisions at work for the better are the highlight of any writers day. Let’s keep that magic working.

So that is it. Pretty simple right? It is hard to be more concrete looking forward because we as a staff have many decisions to make, but just writing some ideas down provides a measuring stick to look back through the year to make sure we are on the right path and attaining our goals.

Hopefully you are as excited about 2009 as we are… The possibilities are endless!

The Six Month Post – Revisiting This Blog’s Purpose

Kyle James — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:17:05 +0000

.eduGuru was started as a New Year’s resolution and unlike most New Year’s resolutions it is actually still going and quite strongly. I’m almost embarrassed to point back to that inaugural post, Look ma I’m a Blogger, where I attempted to lay a framework for this blog, but it is also a testament to how far I’ve come as a writer, thinker, marketer, and the one I’m most proud of a teacher.

Let me be very up front and say that writing a good blog is a very time consuming commitment. For me it’s not been so much coming up with ideas or writing have been the time sucker it’s the reading and research that goes into blogging. In fact I’ve got lots of unfinished blog post idea just waiting to be finalized and published. Hopefully you haven’t read something on this blog that hadn’t been thoroughly researched and thought through? I always try and do my homework and part of that is staying connected to what else is out there on the web. Blogging, for me, has meant adding 15+ hours a week to my plate in reading. I’ll admit that for things I care about I’m a perfectionist and hopefully my readers benefit from this.

In my initial post I mentioned five key reasons for me starting a blog. It’s probably a good time to revisit them and see how I’m coming along on them.

My Five Key Reasons to Blog

Place to write down thoughts – I guess this was one of my original goals and I definitely ran with it in posts like my Blog Manifesto and many others. In one way or another I guess every post is me writing down my thoughts.
Build a reputation as a credible and knowledgeable individual – well this is really up to the each individual to decide, but being invited into BlogHighEd and the hundreds of RSS subscribers has been beyond my wildest dreams.
A place to connect with others in Higher Education Web – WOW! The network of individuals that I have meet and friends that I have made in the Higher Education Web world has been an absolutely amazing! I honestly can’t say it enough how exciting I am about going to eduWEB in less than two weeks and meeting so many of you that I chat with weekly or daily through forums, twitter, blog comments and connect with through LinkedIn. You people absolutely ROCK! Thank you for letting me in.
Resume builder and Financial Compensation – In many ways once you have established yourself as a blogger it becomes your resume. I’m not sure if I’ve gotten to that point yet, but you can bet the Ranch I’ve got the URL listed on my paper resume! As far as financial compensation I’m doing some really great freelancing work now that would have never been available to me before my experience with blogging. Although I do have Google Ads on the right hand side of this blog, I’m ready to remove them any day now because they have only brought in about $10 over the six months and they just aren’t worth the noise to me.
Become an expert in my niche – Starting out I thought Higher Education Web WAS a niche, but since then I’ve specialized even further. As I’ve gotten more and more excited about internet marketing and less about coding and designing my niche has changed. I’ve actually kind of picked up some buzz as a Web Analytics in Higher Education Thought Leader as I’ll be presenting on this subject at multiple engagements through the end of the year, more to come on the specifics of these. Web Analytics, SEO, and Social Media all tie so much together that if anything these have become my areas of expertise I guess. How they are beneficial to Higher Education has been a real challenge and one that there doesn’t seem to be any clear representation for in our industry. I was just telling Karlyn the other day how I feel like such a rookie in Web Analytics, but how my work has kind of put me on the cutting edge of it for Higher Education.

So those were my goals and I feel really good about how far I’ve come in the last six months. So Heidi this post was hopefully also the long awaited response to your meme that I told you I would leave.

Everyone Should Blog

To anyone out there who is reading this and thinking I want be a blogger then I strongly encourage you to give it a shot! Drop me a line and I’ll check it out and follow you. I encourage ANYONE that feels like they are doing 100% work and no recognition well why not try doing 80/20 where the 20% is promoting your own work? You might think you don’t have time to spend researching and writing, but honestly can you afford not too? That’s kind of how I’ve approached this as I know there are people at Wofford who read my blog and hopefully it’s made them along with the rest of my readers more aware about what Wofford is doing to Market Online.

I simply ask how can you expect others to promote and praise your work if they don’t know about it and if you don’t share it with them in the first place? Is it an ego thing, well maybe, but it’s also opening up communication, networking, and sharing with the greater community. My growing network of friends and colleagues is invaluable and I look forward to growing and sharing new experiences with you as we go along!

So start your own blog, become an expert in your own niche! I mean if I have been able to accomplish this level of success in six months, just imagine what you could accomplish?! I’ll admit it’s been a TON of long hours and hard work, but my knowledge and network has gained exponentially. Also I’m sure there are those of you reading this who know much more than I do and I look forward to reading your work!

So finally in carrying on Heidi’s Meme I want to call out a few of my favorite Higher Ed blogger’s who I feel comfortable enough to ask to share, how blogging has Impacted their work. Let’s go:

Brad J Ward
Karlyn Morissette
Eric Stoller
Mike Richwalsky
Karine Joly
FJ Gaylor
Andrew Careaga
Dennis Miller
Matt Herzberger – Care to come out of blog retirement and post one for us?

Do you Data Mine your Blogs?

Kyle James — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:46:18 +0000

As I introduced in my previous post this week, Information about Wofford’s Blogs and Alumni Bloggers, Wofford has a lot going on in our Network of blogs. Now that it’s the summer time and content is a little slow for most colleges there is the dilemma of what to feature on the main site homepage? Well maybe you don’t have a spotlight type feature like Wofford does on its homepage, but none the less do you data mine your blogs?

Blogs Produce Lots of Great Content

Doing a quick scan of Wofford’s Blogs Network we have around twenty blogs. Some blogs are much more active than others, but nonetheless they produce a wealth of quality content that is usually buried deep down in the site. Me being a personal blogger I understand the challenges of trying to get people to understand this new form of communication. The only way to do that is to continually expose people to quality blog content. Also your bloggers really appreciate it when they see that you’re promoting their work and it encourages them to produce more and better content.

Promote your Blogs

Being the analytical junkie that I am I have not been extremely impressed with our blog visit numbers and have been racking my brain to find ways to increase RSS subscribers and increase visits and exposure to the blogs. So the question is how to do this? We have occasionally featured a blog post or promoted a blog linking to specific posts off our homepage spotlight. This has created an instant boost of hits to the blog, although I’ll be the first to admit it is hard to say it has contributed to long term readers.

Another great way to promote your blogs is through your email marketing efforts. It’s a double win! We are constantly looking for good content to feature in our mailshots, so sometimes we data mine the best of the blogs. We also want to promote our blogs so we mention them in emails. Enough said!

Data Mine for Content

Lastly there are times when a great piece from a blog can be used somewhere on the site. Last post I mentioned our Study Abroad blog and there have been a few things they have pulled from that blog to use on their departmental site.

Other great examples come from our From the Archives blog. From the Archives is a blog written by the college Archivist Phillip Stone. On this blog Phillip does a great job of tying current events to the past. For example during Black History month he did a series of posts about African-American History on campus or tied in a post about athletes from 1915 during Baseball season. These are great to data mine for the homepage! As Phillip has gotten more comfortable with the system he’s even included audio. We have a page on the site about Wofford’s Alma Mater and Motto so when he included an audio of the Glee Club performing the Alma Mater from 1950 it made complete sense to link to that post.

Closing Questions

So how are you promoting your blogs? Do you data mine them for content across the site? What tricks have you used to get people to subscribe to RSS feeds?

Links of the Week June 20th, 2008

Kyle James — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:22:57 +0000

Since the week started out with such a powerful debate about Higher Education bloggers and their need to market themselves… hum… I better just leave it at that. If you missed out and want to read the whole conversation head on over to Andrew’s post Higher Ed Bloggers: Show Your Power! and you can follow the trackback links in the comments from there. This week I’m breaking my rule and posting a few more than seven lucky links. I can’t decide which to purge out at this point so I’m just going to give you “teeeeen”. A perfect TEN!

5 Great (Free) Web Analytics Tools You Might Not Know About Yet – Some are not your traditional web analytic tools, but still interesting
Dorms Contest Site Launches – Wayne State’s new Dorms Contest Site. Check out the short writeup then head over to the site. Excellent example of fun and hip admission web projects
How Do You Calculate The Value of a Friend on Facebook? – Key takeaway. Over 50 percent of social media users expect nonprofits to have some type of presence. Increasingly, nonprofits will need to have some type of a presence.
How we read online. - Thanks to D.W. for sharing the piece. I’ve read similar articles before, but really like the way this one is written and the examples it gives throughout the text.
Which email clients are your subscribers using? – It’s never been that easy to know which email clients your list subscribers are using to view your painfully crafted campaigns. Now the team behind the email testing service Litmus have released a smart new app to solve the mystery.
Firefox 3: Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3 – You already know about Firefox ’s marquee new features but now it’s time to dig deep and unearth the shortcuts
Is LinkedIn Worth $1 Billion? – You have probably heard the news that LinkedIn picked up $53 million for a 5% stake in the company. Well this is an interesting breakdown if it’s actually worth it or not.
Quick Guide To Social Media – A nice quick introduction guide to send to someone wanting to understand some aspects of Social Media, but no idea where to start.
Pages are for Browsing, Groups are for Relationships – A very nice and well thought out look at Facebook Groups and Pages with solid takeaways and examples of when to use which.
100 Awesome Webmaster Videos on YouTube – While many people see YouTube as a fun and mindless distraction, the fact is that it’s really quite useful. The video site is full of educational tools for just about anyone, webmasters included. These 100 videos for webmasters include clips with subject

Ok so I realize I’ve already given you an overload, but I think I’m going to start adding a hilarious video of the week. So this first week it’s the Two Stupid Crooks of the month. It’s Friday so enjoy the video and if you decide to rob a place here’s some practical advice about what NOT to do.

Quick Post: Heat Mapping and Monthly Blog Data

Kyle James — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:39:35 +0000

I just wanted to share some quick data from a board of trustee’s committee presentation that I made yesterday. Two specific slides stood out as something I thought would be neat to share.
(Click on the images for larger versions)

Heat mapping

Heat mapping is a great way to visually see where traffic visiting your site clicks. It enables you to understand usability habits. I signed up for a month’s worth of service from CrazyEgg and ran four weekly test on the homepage. I think what’s most apparent is that our left hand navigation menu is definitely doing what it is intended to do and specifically driving lots of students to the Admission or Prospective Student section of the site. I won’t bore you with lots of other observations, but I will say that it is interesting that the heatmap looks surprisingly similar every week.

Monthly Blog Facts
I still have it on the backburner to write a post describing Wofford’s Blogs, but this slide is very simple and provides some quick data about Wofford’s blogging program specifically related to First Year Bloggers. In my opinion blogging isn’t the way to reach prospective students, but I have a strong feeling their parents read them and that’s still very important. From the data presented on this monthly snapshot people are visiting and reading our blogs. It’s also important to keep in mind that most RSS subscribers read posts through a feedreader and never visit the site so their tracking data isn’t accounted.

Do You Join the Conversation or Stay at a Distance? Comments Welcome!

Kyle James — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:14:57 +0000

I’ve noticed over the months that there is a select group of people that seem to comment across the blogs in the Higher Education arena. I’m assuming that there are more individuals following the conversation as BlogHighEd is reporting over 250 RSS subscribers on their site and I’ve got slightly over 75 on a good day so somebody must be reading this along with the rest of the Higher Education blogs. What I enjoy most about reading blogs is the ability to toss my 2¢ into the discussion. I’ll admit that I have a tendency to be a little outspoken.

Please Leave Your Comments Here
by ansy

One of the golden rules to becoming a good blogger is to be a good commenter and therefor contributor. Why is this you ask? Because if you leave meaningful comments on other blogs it might poke someone reading the comment to click on your name and visit your blog. So with that mind set, then leaving a comment is only beneficial to bloggers as it’s a form of link-building. I challenge this! Comments provide great conversation and a lot of times what the blogger posted is incomplete and there are other details that can be added. A great example of this is my recent post, Test Results: Comparing 11 Free Analytic Services. In this post I tested and rated quite a few free web analytic applications. Some comments suggested additional applications to test that I hadn’t even thought of or knew about. Although I’ll admit that I haven’t tested them yet, I do plan to, the conversation was continued and additional information was shared.

I am addicted to knowledge and love to learn. One excellent way to learn is through communication and sharing ideas and knowledge.

So what happens if you read a post and you have nothing to add, but you did gain from it or enjoyed the content? In my opinion commenting “great post”, “thanks for sharing”,or “I totally agree” isn’t really worth anything unless you follow this up with more detail. Although those are warm fuzzes for the writer what does it really accomplish? I tend to stay away from these sort of comments. Of course that’s just my opinion, and just like anyone else I like to have “nice post” comments. In the big picture isn’t it more satisfying if someone votes up your content than writes a comment that doesn’t add to the conversation? Well this is what social media is all about. There are lots of times that I read a post and I don’t have anything to add, but it was a good post so I’ll give it a Stumble thumb up (if I really like it a short review), and depending on what kind of content it is submit it to the appropriate social network to share. Each network is a little different and each has a slightly different audience, but all good content falls into worthy of Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Digg, or Sphinn sometimes multiple and sometimes Twitter worthy. Human beings are social creatures after all.

As a blogger there are a few things that you can do to make this as easy as possible for your readers.

Setup a subscribe to comments option or an RSS feed of your comments definitely helps. WordPress has a great plug-in that I use that will let users Subscribe to Comments and this is definitely the easiest way to allow the conversation to continue. Co.mments.com is a nice service that allows you to track comments on blog posts by adding a java toolbar. A while back Brad Ward did a How To Tuesday explaining co.mments in more detail. The bottom line is this is an additional barrier that a reader has to know about to keep up with the conversation. There have been times when I haven’t left a comment because I was looking for more insight and being honest with myself I wasn’t going to come back to the post to check for a response.
Setup a social bookmarking widget is the easiest way to allow visitors to submit your content to social media sites. There are lots of WordPress plug-ins that will help you with this, but the two that really stand out above the pack are ShareThis and AddThis. Having one of these is as important to a blog site as setting up Feedburner! I also know for a fact that ShareThis and AddThis also have widgets for Typepad. Personally I’d go with ShareThis if you are split between the two and just want a decision made for you. If your visitor is tech savvy then they most likely have a social bookmarking toolbar such as Shareaholic, but once again this is an additional barrier that doesn’t make your site user friendly.

So to all bloggers out there who lack the above mentioned functionality. I challenge you to step up and make your site more user friendly to encourage the conversation.

And to readers lets discuss and support the bloggers. Now that they have done their part to lower the barriers of communication let’s learn from each other.