Business Development ideas
Somebody came to the blog yesterday after doing a search on MSN. It isn't unusual for people to arrive on the blog after a search, but I don't get many visitors from MSN: plenty from Technorati, some from Google and a few from Del.icio.us. Most people arrive on the blog after seeing a post somewhere else.
The search was 'business development ideas'. I replicated the search and I'm on the second page which is OK when you think that I don't do anything special to promote this blog. So, someone is searching for business development ideas, finds my (highly relevant) blog and according to my stats, leaves instantaneously. Hey, what happened? They missed all the good stuff. Well, they missed out all the less good stuff, too, but that's beside the point. Navigation around blogs can be problematic and my Del.icio.us tags may not be everyone's idea of a carefully crafted taxonomy.
Well, as I keep telling clients, you have to make an impact straight away. Even when visitors find such a relevant result as this site. You have to work hard on the copy, continuously honing those compelling headlines and brilliantly seductive content to draw readers in, paragraph by paragraph. I don't think I'm that bad at it - the average read time on the site varies, but at the moment it is well over 3 minutes.
This leads us back to the nature of the search result. In this case, the result was the home page - Technorati or Google searches tend to produce permalink searches to individual posts. That makes the casual visitor's life much easier, since they don't need to waste time wading through all the fluff they don't need.
My conclusion: you can't please all of the people, all of the time. Either that, or yesterday's visitor suffered a catastrophic power failure as soon as they arrived on the site.
The search was 'business development ideas'. I replicated the search and I'm on the second page which is OK when you think that I don't do anything special to promote this blog. So, someone is searching for business development ideas, finds my (highly relevant) blog and according to my stats, leaves instantaneously. Hey, what happened? They missed all the good stuff. Well, they missed out all the less good stuff, too, but that's beside the point. Navigation around blogs can be problematic and my Del.icio.us tags may not be everyone's idea of a carefully crafted taxonomy.
Well, as I keep telling clients, you have to make an impact straight away. Even when visitors find such a relevant result as this site. You have to work hard on the copy, continuously honing those compelling headlines and brilliantly seductive content to draw readers in, paragraph by paragraph. I don't think I'm that bad at it - the average read time on the site varies, but at the moment it is well over 3 minutes.
This leads us back to the nature of the search result. In this case, the result was the home page - Technorati or Google searches tend to produce permalink searches to individual posts. That makes the casual visitor's life much easier, since they don't need to waste time wading through all the fluff they don't need.
My conclusion: you can't please all of the people, all of the time. Either that, or yesterday's visitor suffered a catastrophic power failure as soon as they arrived on the site.
posted by John Diffenthal at 7:50 am
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