Why you should look at your website more often

07/09/2007 by Tony Attwood.

According to a survey in the US around 40% of Americans have visited a blog, 80% know what a blog is and 8% have their own blog, which makes blogging one of the fastest growing phenomena of all time.

But so what?

As you would expect there is a link to age here - 90% of the 25-34 year olds know what a blog is, but less you think this is just a young person’s thing, 65% of the over 65s know as well and 45% of this age group have visited one.

So it’s a big thing and covers all ages. But still, so what?

I think blogging is one more element in the marketing mix, not least because nearly one third of all blog visitors apparently clicked on an advert while reading the blog.

Now we mustn’t rush to the view that blogs are wiping out other media - they are not. This is an addition - a new way of spending time.

What is interesting in the UK however is the large number of firms that are not involved in blogging at all. Indeed, dare I say it, a lot of UK companies have not yet started to analyse how many hits they get onto their web site and what happens as a result. Firms often tell me that “we have a web site”, but when I go and look I find it is out of date, hard to read, irrelevant, or (in around 10% of cases) simply not there.

Which suggests that not only are lots of companies not thinking about blogs, they are not even looking at their own web sites, and thinking about them.

It is rather like direct mail. Doing it is one thing, but only one thing. You also have to analyse the results of doing it - such as how many orders you got from a mailshot. If you don’t know the answer, how do you know how well your money is being spent? The same is true with web sites - and through them blogs.

Let me give an example. My company owns a site to do with education and we’ve worked hard so that when someone types “schools” into Google our site is on the first page - usually number 4 or 5 out of the 35 million hits Google offers. As a result we get over 1000 people coming to the site each day. Which is fine as far as it goes - but it doesn’t really do us much good unless people start buying things, or get in touch with us, or give us some other benefit.

So we start tracking where they are going. We set up experiments to see how many people follow a link, and so on.

And we keep on refining - just as one does with a mail shot. It really is an important part of the work, in my opinion.

If you would like to talk to me about how we do this, and what we do, I am very happy to discuss such matters. Give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Posted in Uncategorised | Print | Comments Off