I hate doing things that waste my time. I also get annoyed when Pageviews are bandied about. A 2013 study by Incapsula revealed that 61% of web traffic is from bots. Is your target reader a bot? Mine's certainly not!     Don't get me wrong. I too obsessed over my site's Pageviews. When I reached 500 posts on this site, I shared my growth in terms of visitors and pageviews, knowing full well that I'd gamed the numbers, especially for 2012. Sure I posted consistently. I posted a lot. But was it quality--making a difference to anyone? Did it allow you to get to know me? No and no.   A quick pause. When I'm talking about "gaming the numbers" I'm not talking about buying clicks or traffic. I'm talking about writing and posting content that attracted traffic, for example Tuesday Shoesday, Thursday Purseday (once a meme, but no longer), Font Friday, and so on. These were strong hashtags and many women were searching for them. My target reader then l...

Whether you're a blogger or not, you're an influencer. We all are. Think about it. Every time we Tweet, post a photo to Instagram, or share an update on Facebook, we're influencing someone. And whether or not we'd like to admit it, we're all biased. This is the first in a four-part series about influence.     With influence comes responsibility, especially when it comes to bias. Bias isn't a bad thing. Bias is our personal taste, our design aesthetic, our consumption philosophy.     We're selective in what we share. This selection reflects our bias. What we choose to buy or not buy. What we choose to eat or not eat. Each decision we make defines us. How we make those decisions and whether someone else shaped those decisions (influenced us) is important -- especially if a decision appears to be counter to our image.   How do you make decisions about what to buy? Where to travel? What to believe?     Whether intentional or not, we're not always...

It's easy to become fixated on numbers; FeedBurner's hiccup with subscriber counts was a wake up call. If you're obsessed with numbers you're doing it wrong. Instead, focus on why readers subscribe to your blog and the numbers will come -- whether you can see them or not.     A funny thing happened when Feedburner's subscriber counts dropped to 0 for everyone . Panic. For me? No, life went on. I just temporarily deleted the widget. The funny thing came after the counts were restored and I went to add back the widget.   Somehow I had two -- not one, but two Feedburner feeds -- for my blog. One feed had a steady base of two to three subscribers; this was the feed originally reported on my blog. The other feed -- the one I wasn't aware of -- had more subscribers.   Did the low number of subscribers influence me? Yes. Because people follow me, I want to deliver consistent, well-thought out, quality posts. Sometimes I don't, life happens, but it's not becaus...

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how people buy. Does social media play a part? Is direct mail dead? Do people make sizable purchases without kicking the tires?     The product I market has a long sales cycle, anywhere from three months to over 18 months. During that time our customer will have numerous opportunities to interact with our brand: tradeshows, our website, our blog, email, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, online advertising, direct mail, and more. To increase total sales and to reduce our sales cycle for purchases by others we analyze every interaction for clues.   We sell to other businesses, but this desire to know why customers are buying and to do more of what worked to sell more applies to all businesses. So I wondered what my buying behavior must look like to the shops I buy from. As these reflections became a very long post, I split them into a series of three posts. Today I'll talk about three magazines I fell in love with and how these love affai...

Twitter tools seem to be a dime a dozen; everywhere you look there's a new one popping up or alternately closing down. During the Marketing Debate: Is Twitter as a Social Network Dead? I came across another: TweetCharts , a tool that allows you to generate a report of custom data for anything you can search Twitter for (hashtags, words, phrases, usernames, or URLs).     For a given search in TweetCharts, you can see how popular it is (number of tweets, frequency of tweets or tweets per hour, the unique users talking about it) as well as who's talking about it (sources and most mentioned users). You can also see what type of content is being tweeted: Are people asking questions? Providing Links? Or, sharing photos and/or video (media)? Also available is sentiment - are people speaking positively or negatively about the topic. (Note that sentiment measures are imprecise at best. See Avinash Kaushik's Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics write up for a detailed an...

Looking for suggestions on how to improve your online influence? For guidance on your Twitter influence, check out Twitter Counter .     Their Twitter Profile Checker utility offers advice about Followers, Ratio of Who You Follow to Who is Following You, and Average Tweets. The utility also "reviews" your basic information. For example, do you provide a URL where you can be reached? Have you uploaded an avatar? Do you share where you're tweeting from? Twitter Counter provides recommendations for keeping this information current. At the bottom of the report, Twitter Counter gives you a grade. Currently my overall score is 79%; I need to work on my Ratio (they recommend a ratio of 5 and mine is 3.7). Do you think Twitter is a dying social network?   Is Twitter a dying social network? If it is, does your Twitter influence really matter? Depends on who you're trying to reach and what networks they're on. Regardless of whether you care about Twitter, you should jo...

Got Klout? Want to get paid for your online influence? Check out Refer.ly, an online referral system for your social network, and earn rewards for your friends' actions.     First a couple of clarifications. Yes, you can use Refer.ly anywhere, it works like Bit.ly, shortening URLs and tracking the shortened URL. No, you won't get rewarded for all products purchased. To get rewarded, you need to select products from Refer.ly's Merchant Network.   Currently you can find a listing of Refer.ly's partners/participating retailers at the bottom of each page by clicking For Business and following the Partner Directory link, selecting Retailer Directory from the account drop-down menu, or on the home page, scrolling past the fold and clicking See the complete list. There are some surprising absences, for example Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, bebe, and Express are participating while White House | Black Market is not. Similarly, All Modern, Crate and Barrel, CB2, and Design withi...

It's been awhile since I talked about Klout . To summarize, I'm no longer an Explorer, up until last week I was a Conversationalist, now I'm a Networker. How did I do it? (I had a baby, and I post lots of photos of my cat.) Read on for my secrets! First a quick review of the three Klout Styles: Explorer: " You actively engage in the social web, constantly trying out new ways to interact and network. You're exploring the ecosystem and making it work for you. Your level of engagement shows that you "get it," we predict you'll be moving up. " Conversationalist: " You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it's an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word. " Networker: " You know how to connect to the right people and share what's important to your audience. You generously share your network to help your followers. You have a high l...

When it comes to measuring your influence for shared images, whether on Flickr, Instagram, or Pinterest , there's not yet an aggregated influence score. (With Klout you can link your Flickr and Instagram accounts, but Klout is not yet incorporating statistics from these social channels in the overall score. Flickr provides high-level account statistics, as does Statigram , an Instagram application that I looked at a few months ago. There doesn't appear to be an influence measurement tool for these channels yet.) Today I look at two online tools for determining your Pinterest influence -- Pinpuff and PinReach (formerly PinClout). Both of these are in early development. Side by side, Pinpuff has the edge right now, giving the best breakdown for influence on Pinterest. Pinpuff doesn't dive into effectiveness of specific content - for example, most popular repins or likes. If you want to see most popular repins to judge effectiveness of your content, you'll also need to pe...

Today I'm focusing on influence and impact measurements. No, I'm not talking about Klout or PeerIndex - they aggregate influence. I'm looking at two other tools - Vizify TweetSheet and bit.ly - that can help you finetune your message and improve your marketing. NOTE: Tools that enable a deep dive into your content's effectiveness come and go quickly. One such tool, BackType that showed the impact of your blog posts across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and more was acquired by Twitter in July 2011 and shuttered. Bit.ly One of the oldest ways to measure your content's impact across multiple channels, including Twitter or Facebook, is bit.ly . With bit.ly, you can shorten URLs and track how many people click through. You can look at your total clicks for the past 30 days, past 14 days, past 7 days, past 24 hours, or past hour. In this time frame, bit.ly shows where the clicks came from by site and country. For a given link, you can also view how many of the total c...

Since becoming aware of how online work reputation could impact bonuses as well as potentially the jobs you can apply to and interview for , I've started paying attention to my online influence scores. I've also been rethinking a strategy of multiple accounts focusing on one topic over a single account that touches on multiple subjects.   Pinnable image here   The two metrics for online influence that have been in the news recently are Klout and PeerIndex ( Wall Street Journal ,  Forbes ,  Inc. ). (Prior to these metrics, I monitored my influence with socialmention and Grader.com from Hubspot . There are other tools as well, for example, Twitalyzer ( shutdown 9/23/2013 ) and Crowdbooster .) Whether you agree or disagree with the accuracy of these tools, scoring systems based on your visible actions and results are not going away (see  In Defense of Klout Measurment for Social Media Influence  by  Neal Schaffer  of...