Red Cedar Music Blog

Is Anybody Reading My Blog? How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog & Track the Results Using Google Analytics is the third in a series of four blogs I am writing about Red Cedar Chamber Music‘s experience working with social media experts Greg Epstein and Andrew Nicholas through Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program (see previous blogs on April 4th & May 24th). Note that Qwest is now CenturyLink.

Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program is being offered to select small businesses like Red Cedar Chamber Music to help them launch blogs and optimize their ability to effectively use social media to enhance marketing and drive traffic to their websites. The ultimate business goal of blogging and effectively using social media is to reach new customers and increase sales. So, how can those of us devoting valuable business time to posting blogs ensure that our blog posts are attracting traffic AND how do we get detailed feedback on our blog’s traffic patterns, who is reading our blogs and what referrals are directing them to our blog?

Ensuring that your blog posts are attracting traffic:

• Key Words – First and foremost are the key words you incorporate into the text of your blog, which are likely to drive people interested in your blog topic to the blog. These keywords like chamber music and chamber music blog should appear numerous times throughout the blog so that search engines like Google will be able to accurately identify the content of your blog and pull up your blog site when people search the internet for these key words. The more effective you are at using key words, the greater the likelihood your site will show up high on the list of websites selected by a search engine. NOTE: Keywords should be incorporated into the natural flow of the blog test and each keyword should not comprise over circa 5% of the blog text so that Google or other search engines do not avoid listing your blog site because they feel you are keyword stuffing.  Use Google’s Keyword Tool to discover search volume for specific search terms (keywords). This allows you to incorporate keywords into your blog that people are using frequently when they do web searches.
  

• Post Tags – Next are the post tags that you assign to each of your blogs. At the bottom of this blog you will see Tags: followed by tags words that I have attached to this specific blog post. Listing  tag words that are important to the content of the blog will also help search engines correctly locate your blog for inclusion in a listing resulting from a web search.
  

• Comments on FaceBook- Find FaceBook sites that relate to your topic of interest and indicate that you like these sites. You can then leave comments about their FaceBook posts that will make visitors aware of your FaceBook page and increase the chances that they will visit your FaceBook page and become aware of your blog. NOTE: Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad program has helped us using dlvr.it to integrate our social media sites so that each time I post a blog, it also posts on our Twitter and FaceBook pages. You can set this up to happen with your blog posts as well at dlvr.it.

Detailed feedback on our blog’s traffic patterns through Google Analytics:

• Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program also has helped us add Google Analytics to our WordPress Dashboard so that we can see traffic patterns related to our blog site. This tell us how many hits we have every day and if people are staying to read the blog or leaving within 30 seconds. We can also sign into Google Analytics and get more detailed information about the geographic location of those visiting the site, where they were referred from ie Google search, FaceBook, newspaper article with a listing of the blog etc. and  key words or phrases that drove them to our blog. This is invaluable information for us to verify the effectiveness of the blog and to help us modify future blogs for maximum exposure and impact.

Well, time to go and have my weekly personal consult with Andrew of Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program. He will help me review this post and make sure it is accurate. I have had a great experience with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program and will give you a wrap up about Red Cedar Chamber Music‘s experience working with Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad Program in my final Qwest blog in July.

John Dowdall

Artistic Director

Red Cedar Chamber Music