Users don’t click on your blog page, and that’s ok

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You’ve probably heard that having a blog on your site is a great way to increase traffic and awareness, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, most users that visit your site won’t go over and visit your blog page. If that’s the case, then why blog at all? Because it’s intended for everyone else.

For a great example, let’s look at the GreenMellen blog. That page I just linked you to is incredibly unpopular. Of the 25,000 visitors we’ve had on our site this year, only 433 have gone to that page. Here’s a heat map that shows that relatively unpopular link at the top, with only about 3.3% of our home page visitors clicking over to the blog. Even that measly 3.3% is higher than most sites see. When someone visits your home page, they rarely go in search of your blog.

However, visitors have read our individual blog posts thousands of times, and we have five different posts that have more than 433 views each. Across our site, users have read content from 1,159 different pages this year, many of those being individual posts.

Google loves blog posts

Why does it work this way? It’s really two reasons:

  1. Search engines love blogs
  2. Blogs can be great content for social media.

As I shared earlier this year, Google ranks pages, not sites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality pages you have on your site, the more chances you have to rank well for any given search. Great blog posts are a perfect way to build that inventory. If you can continually write excellent content on your site, each piece of content can turn into a great place for Google to send people.

Users hate “blogs”

If you write great content, users will find those individual posts (very often through Google) that help answer their question and that’s a win for everyone. You helped someone solve their problem, and you attracted a user to your site (who now knows you as someone that helped them, which is always good).

As a whole, though, users don’t like blogs. They have nothing against them, but they don’t have time to just read through them to see if anything is interesting. They want answers to their questions, and Google may guide them to one of your posts that has the perfect answer. Take the win, and don’t worry when the clicks to your main “blog” link end up looking a little weak.

We’ve had 25,000 users visit our site this year, only 433 clicked on the blog, and it’s working perfectly.

Episode Zero

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Over the past few years, it’s become popular for brand new podcasts to first publish an “Episode 0”, or something like “Introducing the xx podcast”. While introducing your podcast isn’t a bad idea, that’s not the real purpose of these initial episodes. Consistency is.

The way they were built, with the exception of some shows like Joe Rogan, podcasts use the open RSS format to share their episodes. This means any podcast player out there could find the feed for your show and offer it to their listeners, which is a great thing. However, given the huge number of podcasts out there, those players aren’t just randomly finding shows and adding them — you need to request to be added, and then you need to wait. Apple Podcasts is generally the biggest one to get into, as it powers many other apps, but it can take a few weeks to get accepted.

The other challenge is that places like Apple Podcasts won’t accept a show that doesn’t have any episodes. You need to publish at least one episode before you can apply to be added, and then you need to wait a few weeks for approval. As a result, it can be a messy few weeks trying to get approved by all of the major podcast apps (including others like Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc).

If you produce “Episode 1” at the beginning, you can’t really promote it for a while, as some of your potential audience might be able to download it, and others can’t. With “Episode 0”, you never really promote that episode. You publish it, start getting accepted to the various apps, and then you can hit the ground running with your real “Episode 1” a few weeks later.

It’s kind of an awkward way to do it, but it works well. If you’re planning to launch a podcast, I encourage you to create a super short intro episode, get it out into the world, and then focus your efforts on a proper promotion for your first true episode a few weeks later.

Too many internal links can be a problem

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When adding content to your website, linking from one of your pages to another can be a great thing! As I’ve mentioned before (and a great example of an internal link), Google ranks individual pages, not full sites. Internal links help Google move around your site and get a better feel for the structure of everything.

Like most good things though, too much of that good thing can be a problem. Since Google uses those internal links to help understand the flow of your site, if every page on your site has hundreds of links to other pages on your site, it creates kind of a mess for Google to sort through and they can have a difficult time seeing the big picture.

As Google’s John Mueller recently said (via SEJ), when asked if too many internal links could be a problem:

I think, in the sense that we do use the internal links to better understand the structure of a page, and you can imagine the situation where if we’re trying to understand the structure of a website, with the different pages that are out there, if all pages are linked to all other pages on the website, where you essentially have like a complete internal linking across every single page, then there’s no real structure there.

I still encourage you to link liberally on your pages. If you can reference an old post or page that offers value to your reader, please link it! Your reader will appreciate it and Google will appreciate it.

However, if you think you’ve found a shortcut by putting dozens or hundreds of links on each page, you’re likely doing more harm than good.

Blogging isn’t a tech issue, it’s a fame issue

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I’ve said on here quite a few times that most everyone should have their own blog, and they should use it as the central place to share their ideas. I still fully believe that, but a recent post from Manuel Moreale has me rethinking my perspective a little bit. Here was his main point:

No one can amass million of followers on a person blog in a matter of weeks. That is something that can only happen on a social platform like Instagram or TikTok. And that’s why most people don’t go down the personal site path. Most people are not chasing freedom of expression. They’re chasing fame. Quantity over quality seems to be the law of the modern web.

We recently saw this exact thing with Donald Trump. When he was on Twitter, it wasn’t the technology that appealed to him — it was the access to millions of users. When he was kicked off Twitter, he started his own blog — and then shut it down after less than a month due to a lack of readership. For someone like Trump, online content is 100% about fame and 0% about freedom of expression.

I think that mindset shift is what’s allowed me to keep publishing every day for more than eight months now. I’m glad people (like you reading this!) follow my work, but the site only sees a few thousand visits per month, which is not “fame” by any definition — and I’m ok with that. I shared early on that I’m writing for me, and if others get benefit from it then that’s just a fun side product.

Manuel’s post helped me to better understand why many others aren’t following suit. It strikes me as odd when people are using Facebook to vent about how awful Facebook is, but now it kind of makes sense. People aren’t trying to unpack whether Facebook is good or not, but rather just trying to get more eyeballs on their words for that bit of fame that they’re seeking. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it helps me to see why behavior like that actually makes a bit of sense.

But seriously — go start your own blog. 🙂

Substack for easier subscriptions

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If you subscribe to this blog via email, you may have noticed a slight change in the format you receive, as I’ve recently moved the subscription part of this site to my new page at Substack.

From your end, essentially nothing should be different. However, if you have your own blog or other content that you produce, I thought I’d share a bit about why I switched. I was previously using MailerLite, and MailChimp before that, and both of those are great services. However, they’re both more powerful (and expensive) than I need, while Substack is a much better fit.

When I say “expensive”, both MailerLite and MailChimp cost <$20/mo, so it’s not like it was a big cost. Substack, though, is completely free. Substack allows you to create paid newsletters (which I don’t plan to add), and they make their money as a cut of that.

For my daily flow, after I publish a blog on my site I simply head over to Substack, copy and paste it there, and then send it out. That’ll let all of my email subscribers get a full copy, as well as keep a full copy in my Substack archive. We’ll see how it goes!

If you’ve not subscribed to get emails of my posts, you can sign up on Substack here. I’ll only send my daily posts, and the email will contain the full content of the post so you aren’t forced to click through or anything. I hope you find this helpful, and if you have your own content on Substack please leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.

Google isn’t looking for tricks

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I’ve said for years that Google doesn’t really change the rules too often. Certainly we’ve seen a few major shifts in the last 20 years (SSL matters more, mobile functionality is huge, etc), but most of what Google looks for has been exactly the same — high quality content that your users find valuable. That’s it.

Google’s John Mueller recently discussed this, with two short quotes sticking out to me:

“just make good websites and think about what your users are searching for”

“there isn’t all that much trick in search”

This isn’t a surprise. People are always looking for the secret way to rank better, and there just isn’t one. Every now and then you can find a way to trick Google and cheat your way to the top, but they always find a way to stop those. Your best bet, as it’s been for a few dozen years now, is to publish great content that people find useful, and you’ll find yourself slowing rising to the top of the search results.

You can read more about this and watch the full video from John over at Search Engine Roundtable.

There’s room for your own island

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When people talk about the big companies online (like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc), it’s easy to think that they make up most of the internet. And while they’re indeed massive, they still only take up small chunks of space compared to the entire web.

To help visualize this, Martin Vargic created a map of the web, with the various countries drawn to their relative scale. It’s amazing work of art!

While you can clearly see the major players on the map, there are a ton of small islands in there (most of which are huge sites), with plenty of room for everyone — including you.

I’ve said it on here many times, but you should absolutely stake your own island in the world. Hanging out on Facebook or Twitter is certainly fine, and can be a great way to keep up with folks, but ultimately you’re playing on someone else’s land. Stake your own plot; there’s room for all of us.

Check out Martin’s high-resolution map if you want to dig in further.

(via Techdirt)

It’s not about ranking first, it’s about ranking first for the right keyword

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Many people make it a goal to rank first in Google, and it’s not a bad plan. The problem is what you’re trying to rank first for.

This is a common tactic that spammers use — they can promise you a #1 ranking as long as they don’t promise exactly what you’d be ranking #1 for, and that’s the key. If you have a website, you almost certainly rank first for something already, but it may not be something that users are actually searching for.

For example, if you search for “weekly previews inefficient“, a post of mine from a few years ago is likely the first one you’ll see. But is that of any value? Probably not, as it’s probably not something that people search for very often. But hey, I’m #1!

It takes some effort to find the right keywords and develop great content to help surface for them, but it’s worth the effort. After all, anyone can rank #1 for something, so make it worth your while to rank #1 for something great.

Less is often more

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One of the brilliant things that Apple does with their products is not overthink the marketing, particularly the packaging. A great example of this was an excellent video produced years ago, showing what Microsoft might do with the incredibly simple iPod packaging:

The idea comes back to a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away

Don’t keep adding unnecessary fluff to your blog post, video, podcast, or product packaging. Strip it down to the best stuff, and then just let it be.

The matrix of my posts

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As I’m writing more and more posts on here, I’m noticing that they vary in two major ways in my head:

  1. The quality of the post, as determined by length and effort that I put in. Some posts I’m quite proud of, while others are merely good enough.
  2. The confidence I have in the content of the post. Some posts I stand behind 100%, whereas others are ideas that I’m thinking through as I type.

Most posts fall into one of those groups, and some hit both. I would hope that I don’t publish anything that falls into neither of them. Here is how it looks in kind of an Eisenhower Matrix layout:

Box 1: We’re Learning Together

I’ve said repeatedly that this blog is a place for me to think out loud. There are some posts that I spend a decent amount of time thinking about and building, but it’s still a concept that I’m not super confident about. Those types of posts would fit into this box. Some examples include:

Box 2: My Favorite Posts

These are posts that I’m most proud of. I worked hard to put them together, and I’m confident about what I said. They include:

Box 3: Never Posted

Hopefully, none of my posts fall into this category. If I’m not confident about a subject, I at least want to take the time to really think through the idea.

Box 4: Short & Sweet

This is where a lot of my posts end up, and likely more over time. These are thoughts that I’m clear about, and I essentially just post a summary of my thoughts. They include:

It’s an interesting lens through which to view my past writing, and most of my posts fit nicely into one of those boxes.

Am I missing any areas? How do you see your writings if you try to break them down like that?