The Quarter in Review – 2008/Q4
Many of the blogs I read have quarterly, or even monthly recaps. Some of these blogs are personal some are professional, and the information in their recap generally reflects their orientation.
Personal blogs tend to focus on their best content, what keywords seem most relevant in their space, comments or discussions of interest, etc. The professional blogs definitely highlight their best content (that is after all their bread and butter), and many also go so far as to talk about their site metrics and income for the period represented.
I’m not trying to make this blog into something more than it is, but taking some time every three months or so to reflect on a couple high points seems like a good thing. This is my second quarterly recap, so yes, DCO has been around for 6 months! It’s been a lot of fun starting and writing a new business-oriented blog after shutting down my old personal interest blog.
As always – thanks for dropping by (and hopefully subscribing). We’re getting a few more comments here and there, which I appreciate. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, spent with family, friends and those most important to you. While I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, I did give some thought to a framework for setting priorities in the upcoming year (which I have never done I’m ashamed to admit), which I’ll be sharing with you very soon.
Let’s hope our collective sense of “hope” for 2009 comes to fruition!
Most popular content
- In total, the series of posts talking about my Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey was by far the most popular. As an outcome of the survey, we talked about necessary and supporting qualities for entrepreneurship, reviewed the comments left as part of the survey, and finally tweaked the list of qualities a bit and talked about moving forward. I’ve had some time to think about this survey and I’m excited about moving it forward in a slightly different manner early this year.
- I’m not sure why (I don’t have great visibility in outbound link clicks), but the Weekend Reader of 10/10/08 was very popular for some reason.
- Building Character through Entrepreneurship was quite popular also. This one was fun to write and had a great message I thought.
- Lastly, the post with a couple take-aways from the Business Incubation conference I attended got quite a few hits as well. The Net Promoter Score was really the highlight of the conference for me; I had never heard of it before and it is a great tool. Also in the post was mention of a 1 Page Strategic Plan. I’m happy to report that I’ve received an electronic copy of the document from the presenter with permission to re-publish and will be doing that very soon.
I also had the pleasure of being invited by Anita Campbell, Editor-In-Chief of Small Business Trends, to participate as a small business expert on her radio show. The topic was “Manufacturing Startups: What You Need to Know”, and yes, transcripts are available! It was a lot of fun, Anita’s staff was fantastic and overall the experience was great.
Lastly, I’ve had a bit of an exchange with Simon Stapleton. Simon runs a blog focusing on personal, career and commercial development in the IT space. Simon and I have been talking about some IT-focused entrepreneurial topics we may dual-publish on our blogs, which sounds very fun. The ball is in my court at the moment, but I need to catch up from the holidays a bit before I tackle this one.
Visitors
Interestingly, while total pageviews were down over the quarter, referrals and search traffic is way up. For those of you who are interested, this was a combination of a two factors.
The decrease in traffic was largely due to me finally deleting my old special interest blog. I had stopped writing on the blog last summer, but I had left a post directing traffic to my new blog. Due to the popularity of the blog in it’s category, it had also been included in Alltop, a very popular online “magazine rack”. Since my old blog started with an “A”, it sorted to the top of that category. So I know traffic was coming from Alltop to my old blog, then folks were clicking over to DCO. Conversion was basically zero since the two blogs were worlds apart in subject matter. What I found very interesting was a constant small trickle of visits every day from my old blog that consistently clicked on the last entry in my “Recent Posts” sidebar. My assumption was that some sort of bot was mining content. But that bot, in addition to the Alltop traffic, all went away when I deleted the old blog, which resulted in the decrease in traffic.
Referrals and search traffic being up is to be expected. The rule of thumb for a new website/blog to start seeing search traffic is six months, although I personally think it is more dependent on the amount of content you have and the density of your keywords. From all the blogs I’ve started, I typically start seeing some search referrals around three months, steadily increasing based on content there on, and that’s what I’ve experienced here.
What’s New?
I installed a related post plugin to the blog. When reading a post of mine, it will recommend related posts for you to read. I like that it is able to present related posts both directly on the blog and also in the RSS feed. However, this particular plugin has some aspects I don’t like. It solely relies on tags to determine the posts that are related. However, I try to keep my tags to a minimum and many times I don’t tag a post at all. There are a few other technical details that I don’t like as well. I just recently read about a different plugin that works more on the text within the post and I’m going to give that one a try and see what happens.
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Comments
Adam,
Two things in particular I liked about NPS:
1) Operationally I loved the simplicity of it. Entrepreneurs are notoriously busy and resistant to “administrivia”. With NPS I could put up a one-click survey that will literally take take them a couple seconds to complete and I get a fairly meaningful number.
2) Paired with the simplicity, I also liked that the score really drove you hard to excellence. If you’re just doing an average job, I could really see getting an awful score. Once you adopt this, it feels like it would really drive you to constant improvement in delivery excellence.
I wouldn’t see an opportunity with us. IF we would adopt NPS, it would probably be a once or twice a year thing for simple customer satisfaction tracking.
On the 1 page strategic plan – I hope to get it out this month. It’s not as simple as just posting it as there are some credits to give and background to write. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.
Dave
would love to see the one page strategic plan – please let us know when you publish.
And what was it about the Net Promoter Score that enchanted you so much? We provide measurement tools for organisations that want to monitor NPS with CustomerGauge – are there opportunities for us? At what price point?
Many thanks
Adam