Okay. Enough patting each other on the back. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.

Analytics is a pretty straightforward tool. You implement it, check up on it (every 5 minutes), and get in a really bad mood when your stats are flatlined. Most of us use analytics for finding out how many pageviews we have to brag to others, but most standard analytics tools (unless you’re using an old hit counter) come with widgets to find out pertinent information about your readers.

But many of you would probably wonder, “why usability testing”? I mean, I already made my design user-friendly, it encourages community, and looks pretty darn sweet. But that side of the work is for designers. For this article we’re bloggers. We don’t have any affect on the design. Or do we? And on top of this, how can we use usability testing as bloggers to effectively write for blogs?

How to Use Analytics to Affect Our Choices

Analytics should help us with the choices we make. Every blog should have some sort of analytics tool, albeit Mint or Google Analytics. If you you’re on a cPanel-based website, then you may even have Awstats automatically enabled on your host to show you some pretty good analytics as well (although a ton uglier than Mint, ask your hoster for more details). Here are some important parts of analytics tools we should pay attention to that will help us create a predisposition of if an article will trend in our community (which is our goal for every article, isn’t it?):

• Visits – The obvious first is visits. This counts for both unique and total pageviews. Generally speaking having high stats from either of these would generally tell you that you’re doing well, however looking at them separately is important. They tell us two things:
  • Unique pageviews tell us whether or not we are getting new readers or not. We should analyze this in weekly/monthly trend graphs since checking daily will likely show our same loyal readers. The more uniques in a month, the larger our readership is growing. This is far more important than it’s brother…
  • Total pageviews can help us determine some other useful analytics, however in this case it can tell us if we have been proving quality content to the community (based on the community’s response), and how many people have been checking into the website. Generally speaking if your unique pageviews at any given time is high, your total pageviews will be as well (otherwise you’re going to have some pretty high bounce rates).

  So here’s what we can determine from these two hefty stats as bloggers: putting statistics side by side with their articles can show us which type of articles trend. Most analytic suites will allow you to see Internal Trends that should help you determine what your readers like (and what your readers love).

• Locations - As if this wasn’t obvious already, you should be paying very close attention to where your users are coming from. For example, I know 32% of my readership is in the U.S. right now. Therefore, if I wrote an article on Canadian law or politics (hypothetically, of course), my U.S. readers would likely cringe and I wouldn’t have many people reading that article. As well, I know that in my articles instead of focusing on topics that are trending on the other side of the world, I should be focusing on trends in the U.S.
• Referrers - Referrers are very important. This will tell us where users are coming from (albeit a Google search, a link posted by someone on Twitter, etc). While it’s very important to follow up with these referrers and notice where a lot of referrals are coming from, referrals can also tell us what other things our readers like and can help us in promotion. For example, if you have a ton of people coming from someone posting a tweet online, you know that Twitter might be right for your business.
• External Trends – External Trends are just as important as Internal Trends – and, if you haven’t gathered already, external trends have to do with where your users go from your website. For example, I saw a lot of my readers followed a link I’d posted a while back about FontCase and using it as a tool. Therefore, I knew that writing an article on typography was a good choice at the time, and providing FontCase as a prize was an even better idea.
• Searches - Okay, so SEO isn’t your job as a blogger. Still, this is an important part of analytics. Finding out where your writers are coming from can really help you find out what your readers are looking for, and will ensure that you’re providing them with that content.
• Durations – While this will surely be a part of the usability section as well, analyzing how long your users are spending on the website can easily tell you their attention span and how much time they spend reading an article. This will greatly help you decide whether your readers will read 1,000 word articles as opposed to 2,000  word articles (like this one).

(Here’s a little side note to all my readers: We’ll be throwing out a new article purely on analytics in the next little while and it might include a giveaway or three. Stay tuned via feed and Twitter if you’re unfaithful and want to see the light!)

How to Use Usability Testing On Our Writing

Usability testing is fun. We have tons of wicked inexpensive remote usability testing tools that can help us find out how our readers read our articles. That’s right – we already know how to make article decisions based on analytics,  now we need to find out how to write articles that our users will want to read.

But I’m a Blogger – I Don’t Have Any Say About Design Changes!

I beg to differ. You have a pretty big job to do for design changes. For example, you’re working with a nice little arsenal of font styles that you can use. For example, we know that bolding text will catch ones attention, and italicizing text will further emphasize a point. We know that users like hierarchy, and you know you have the ability to work with headers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5!). If you’re writing within an application like Wordpress, you also have the ability (in a good theme) to work with photos and align them so that users have pictures to catch their attention.

Great. Now you believe me. We have the flexibility of formatting on our side. How can we work within these limits to create a better user experience in our articles?

Would You Like Fries With That?

So now we have all this amazing content we’ve been hacking at. We’ve got the burger (writers who have been through any sort of writing course will remember the symbolism of a hamburger in regards to writing), now we need the fries and pop. We need to make a combo. I think you get what I mean, and I think that joke/metaphor is getting a little dry at this point.

Here are a few key concepts of usability we should be paying attention to, and some suggestions on how this data can help us find out how to improve those little aesthetics of the content:

• Eye Tracking – Alright, so I don’t expect anyone reading this to be doing this, but eye tracking can be very useful. Find out of your users are so predictable as to be following an F-pattern of reading. What are they looking at? What’s catching their attention? How fast are they reading and do they slow down after some time because they’re getting bored?
• Scroll Rate – How far down the page do your users scroll? When you’re not doing eye tracking, this can help to find out (roughly) where your users stop reading.
• Get Users Opinions – I’m seeing more and more sites having GetSatisfaction toolbars to get real users commenting on improvements to the site. Having similar ideas to this to find out what your users think of everything can be important. You can use this sort of research in the form of a contest as well to get people to give you suggestions for content and improvements. I personally don’t think getting users to go through and read articles will help us as bloggers (e.g. local usability testing) – forcing anyone to read anything. I’d be interested in seeing studies on this if you’ve seen any, though.
• Heat Maps – Heat maps can be useful to find if users are clicking on links you provide, and if users like particular parts of an article. As well, heat maps showing where the user’s cursor was can be useful as studies show that cursor movement heat maps can tell us where users are looking (a good 80-90% of the time).

A Call To Action

I’d like to call all bloggers to band together right now, and hopefully I won’t be alone on this one. We need to demand more information about the readers we write for from our editors. Editors need to open up their analytics to us so we can do our investigating and provide the best article for the community. Because, just like usability testing, we are not our readers, but we need to ensure what we’re writing for them is something that will keep them coming back.

What do you think? What else can we learn from these two tools to effectuate awesomeness in our writing?

Oh, and that new gig? You’ll be hearing about it soon. Trust me.

While other people say spending too much time on Twitter is a waste of time, I disagree. Twitter has shaped my writing and helped me focus on certain elements of my blogging that are more important than others.

Oh, and if you aren’t already, you should start following us on Twitter and via RSS – We’re going to be launching a big contest in the coming weeks for our readers, we have a solid list of articles coming, and this week we’ll be announcing some changes around the blog. Stay tuned, and enjoy the article!

Networking Is Important

We’ve been told this too many times, so I won’t dwell on this point. There are over 19 million people using Twitter, and as of mid-2005, an estimated 70 million blogs existed on the Internet. These are huge numbers. That would mean there is a lot of competition to get our message heard, right? No. We can’t know everyone on Twitter, so we need to work with others to get our messages out there. Why do you think contests, awards, and more of the like are using Twitter as a tool to generate interest and run campaigns?

I have been fortunate enough to land two separate gigs with clients through Twitter. Without Twitter, these clients may not have ever heard of The Phuse. As bloggers we need to use this invaluable marketing tool to our advantage to communicate with other like-minded bloggers in the Twitter community, and use them as vehicles for the articles we put out there.

Here are a few ways to get started:

• Get yourself listed! Having yourself listed will help other like-minded people find you.
• Find others! Albeit through using the above as a tool to find these people, or going through sites you frequent and finding them on Twitter, you need to start following people.
• What you put into it is what you get out of it. The more positive you put into Twitter, the more positive will come back to you. Don’t just focus on tweeting – focus on building relationships with other Tweeps and using common twitter tools like RT and #hastags!

Keep It Simple, Stupid

With Twitter you’re limited to keeping your tweets to 140 characters. Even if you use tools like Tweetlonger, your messages will still remain short and to the point. Those who know me know I’m a very talkative person, and my writing can sometimes reflect that. Twitter teaches me to take the fluff out of what I’m saying and get to the point.

Some ways to do this:

• Write everything that’s on your mind. Start writing and don’t stop. When you’re inspired with an idea – run with it! Put down every idea that comes into your mind regardless of spelling or grammar mistakes. Sometimes before writing a rough first draft, I’ll write a mind map and list of things I want to talk about in any given article. This helps later so I can check off each item to ensure I covered it.
• Now that you have your points and you’ve rambled, start organizing them into headers, sections, etc.
• Edit, edit, edit. Read over what you’ve written, and start removing the fluff. Say your article is 1,000 words – challenge yourself to fit it into 850 words!

Spelling and Grammar Are Important

As if you didn’t know this before, when you’re working within the confines of 140 characters, sometimes you’ll be forced to use slang and use creative spelling to shorten what you’re saying. Still, your followers want to know what you’re saying so you have to make sense of these 140 characters.

While we can’t always spell things correctly because we’re trying to use our characters as best we can, we have to really read over what we’re saying and ensure that it is understandable. Since you’re writing less, people can dwell much easier on your grammar and spelling mistakes.

What has it taught you?

What has Twitter taught you? What do you take back from Twitter, how do you find it useful, and what suggestions for it’s use do you have? Share your ideas below in the comments!

• 5 Tips To Help You Make The Best Use of Twitter As A Marketing Tool
• How addicted to Twitter are you?

I didn’t believe them, but here we are, a month later. We’ve gotten over 4,500 unique visitors with over 7,300 page views. We have over 200 subscribers via Facebook, RSS, and Twitter. Surely this is a landmark for us – but it took a lot more work than whipping something together and posting a few posts. I found out pretty quickly that there are hundreds of other blogs doing exactly what I’m trying to do. There’s a lot of competition.

While most of this competition may be purely friendly, it’s something to be aware of. I like to relate blogging to owning a dog. You say you want one because they’re cute, fun, and are always there for you. You don’t get them because you want to take them for walks, buy their food, take them to the vet, etc. There is a lot of responsibility that comes with having a dog – and likewise, a blog.

So here’s a list of some tips I came up with to help all the people (like us) who are trying to start a blog and don’t know what to expect, or want to be prepared for it.

Install Analytics – But Don’t Look At It

That’s right! I’ve been wanting to use Mint for the better part of three years now, and I finally have a project I can use it on. So what’s the first thing I do right before launch? Install Mint on the site, and add a widget to my Dashboard on my Mac. On top of that, I install Ego on my iPhone that allows me to check my analytics from the road. I even went so far as to bookmark the Mint dashboard on my iPhone so I can check out how my site is holding up at different points during the day.

So, as you can imagine, everywhere I look and everywhere I go, I know how my blog is doing. It’s a little sad, and my friends have found it a usual point of conversation for me to scream out when I’ve hit a certain mark of visitors during the day.

But (as I’ve been oft told), this is very unhealthy. You wake up just to check how you’re doing on your feed and analytics. You get very excited when you’ve got over 200 unique hits in a day, but you’re hanging your head in shame when it’s noon and you haven’t hit 100.

What I would suggest is to get a friend to change the password of your analytics program, and only let you have the password a month or two later when you’re a little less stressed. I find that in constantly checking my analytics throughout the day, I get overanxious and I let it affect my day and my work. Analytics is like the stock market.

Unrelated to analytics (this doesn’t really fit anywhere else), don’t look at your site either. This might be hard, but the only two places I look when working on my site is the Mint dashboard and Wordpress dashboard. I don’t like to look at the site because I know if I do that I will want to revamp it or add features. Before you launch, take a look at your site and figure out what you want to add or change, and choose when you’re going to make those changes. Other than that, sit tight and relax!

Be Ready to Change For Your Visitors

Before the blog launched, I had been posting 10 tweets per day, one every hour, five days a week. In doing so, I had about 100 followers that were complaining to me about how often I was posting. I also saw a huge fluctuation of how many followers I had since I posted so frequently. What I decided to do after a few days of the launch was to send out a survey (obviously through my beloved Wufoo) to friends and coworkers to find out what they thought about our habits and what we could improve on. What we got out of that 5 minute survey was a priceless amount of data that gave us ideas on how to market ourselves over the coming months.

Today, we have almost 200 followers on Twitter. While that may be nothing special (with blogs averaging anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000+ followers), it showed a massive improvement over a short amount of time.

Have Some Content Ready For Padding

We’ve heard this one time and time again, so I won’t go too far into things with it. Before starting a blog (really, before you should even start development), write at least a month’s worth of content. This will not only tell you that there is enough content for your blog, but will prove that you can do it. This doesn’t mean that for the entire month you won’t be doing anything else, but for that month you can worry a little less about the next article and worry more about the one four weeks from now.

We wrote about ten articles before starting the blog, for example. We actually went so far as to team up with Matt, our dedicated editor (and fresh meat in Germany!), to help us out with planning out the content, the writing, and obviously finding all my terrible grammar-related mistakes. If you know a content writer or another blogger, do what you can to keep them with you. Not only do they remind you and push you to keep working, but they’re a huge heap of help when it comes to pushing out quality articles.

Have a Schedule

I find one of the best things for me is having a schedule. I have a seven day post week schedule. This means for every day of the week I’m posting somewhere different. On Sundays, I post our weekly “Sunday Special” Round-Up that consists of our favourite tweets from the week. Mondays and Fridays I find myself working on some photojournalism-related articles that show my exciting adventures. On Wednesday and Saturday I work on my own personal tumblog that showcases my favourite music, or me talking about something that I’m adamant about. Of course, that leaves Tuesday and Thursday for two posts on this blog.

The reason for this is twofold: One, I find I like giving my users a consistent schedule for my posting. This way, they can expect to have three fresh posts from The Phuse’s blog every week. On the other hand, for me this keeps me with the challenge that keeps me going. I schedule posts a long way ahead of time. That’s why some bloggers may find e-mails in their inbox days to weeks before I post an article related to them informing them that they’ll be mentioned

Form Allegiances

You definitely can’t do it yourself, so start making some connections. Here are a few ways you can do this:

• Comment on other people’s blogs. Not only does this give you a good chance of getting recognized by others for your well thought-out comments, but you might find yourself with a new client based on them liking what you said. This being said, make sure you’re posting relevant comments that aren’t just two word “awesome article!” comments (although those are nice to have every so often as a blogger). People will be so interested in what you said that they’ll want to find out who you are.
• Tell people that you’ve mentioned them in articles ahead of time. Make them prepared for the fact, and they’ll oftentimes help you push the article. I’ve made a large amount of my partnerships through these weekly e-mails I send out for people who are mentioned in the “Sunday Special” Round-Up.
• Most of us who have been in the field for long enough have a good amount of contacts to help us out. Make sure you keep these people in touch with what you’re doing, and use them when you feel the time is right. When it’s appropriate as well, offer them something back in return.

Use Social Networking to Your Advantage

The Internet is huge. Sorry to say, but by just posting, no one is going to see you. Getting out there is part forming allegiances, and part social media. For us designers and freelancers, there is a myriad of different places we can post our content. Make sure that as soon as you post, you’re tied into these different third-party sources. I find myself 15-30 minutes before a blog post goes live getting all these places ready for the post so that when it goes live, all I have to do is hit “Submit” across 20-30 tabs.

As well, make sure that you’re using Twitter to your advantage. Before the blog launched I started gaining interest in others and started to form a following by posting resourceful articles through it. That way, when I started the blog I wasn’t starting off with nothing. When the blog launched, I immediately started interacting with others and started posting notices of my articles through it. I also got these allegiances I made retweet my posts so that their readerships (often with thousands more followers than ours) found out about the blog as well.

Everyone is on Twitter nowadays so it’s hard to avoid it. There are other social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Delicious that you can use, but I don’t find them to have the same amount of return. Hell, if you’re launching your site as well, make sure you’ve submitted your site to the design galleries out there. That might not get you as much readership, but will get you a good amount of page views!

Write For Someone Else

Let’s face it: Your blog is out there trying to do what the big blogs are doing. The thing is, the blog things have the advantage of being around longer, having a lot more money from ads, and have 10,000 to 50,000+ more subscribers than you do via social media. Not only can you make some good coin off of writing for others, but you get some awesome traffic as well. Just make sure that when you’re getting this surge of readers that your blog is ready for it (this means your server, too), and that you push out fresh content during this time. Yes, timing is everything, and make sure you align your guest posts being published with your blog’s schedule.

I have personally been asked to write for blogs like Web Designer Depot and Six Revisions, and love to work on articles for my friends over at UX Booth. I try to maintain an average of 3-5 guest posts per month which not only helps pay for diapers, but also gets me a large wave of traffic. And hell, this brainstorming is something I’m oftentimes doing already for my blog. If they don’t want an article to be posted on their blog, I can use it for mine. You don’t have to be asked, though – If you go to any major blog with some ideas for articles, most compensate their writers for the time they put into articles.

Editors for these blogs usually ask for you to pitch them article ideas before you write them. I like to spend an hour to brainstorm ideas and do some research. I bookmark all the resources I need to write the article, print them off, and put time into my articles. What this results in is quality articles for these different blogs with a lot of thought put into them.

In writing for others you’re creating a name for yourself out there and wanting people to find out more about you and where you frequently write. Make them want to check out what you’re doing and interested in keeping up with you!

Keep Writing, Keep Thinking

Writing isn’t the only thing I do (although lately it seems that way). When I’m working and interacting with others, I get ideas for articles through everyday experiences. I like to keep a nice long list of article ideas in Basecamp that I can use. This means less work for me later when I need to write, as I can pick up where I stopped with some idea.

Don’t Write Articles Last Minute

This ties in with writing a months worth of articles before you start the blog. I try to keep a week in advance of my articles. This is easy because I have a schedule that keeps me in line. I try to have routine with my blog entries. I choose an idea from my database that I want to write about, and on the first day take 10-20 minutes to do research, brainstorming, and print off some documents to read over. The second day I hack out a first draft, oftentimes edit it, and a day or two before the post goes live I style it and make any finishing touches with graphics, etc.

This means I have a lot of time to think about my articles and I’m not feeling rushed to push out things. I also find myself doing less round-ups and list posts than the competitors, which I think other people like.

Create Community

This is something I don’t think I’ve been doing enough through the comments here because of how little spare time I have. I find that through RTing other people’s articles, I get a good amount of people message me back asking me to comment on the entry if I liked it. I also found that when I comment on some blogs, the owner takes time out to e-mail me asking me what I liked about the article, what I’d like to see, and thanking me for commenting.

This makes a community that wants to interact with the site more than just reading an article and blindly retweeting it. Some have said before that as writers we need to hit our readers in the beginning, in the middle, and make them excited at the end. Give your users a reason to comment as well with systems that show their latest blog entry from their website, contests, or by spurring discussion at the end of your article with a heavy-hitting question.

Creating community can also be through social media and interacting with other blogs, retweeting others, and just having general conversations.

Improve, Improve, Improve

None of us are perfect! I always like to ask people I guest write for to help me by critiquing my work and suggesting ways of improvement. Also, while I do moderate all comments on this blog, I like people who challenge what I have to say and call out my mistakes. The field of graphic design and development is so large it can be intimidating to write for – but I use it as a way to improve my writing and to improve my work.

Make Sure You Know Why You’re Doing It

Without motivation, you’re not going to want to write, and by forcing yourself you’re going to only suffer. If you have a post schedule, missing a day or a week won’t make that big a difference if you need to take time off to improve. While you may lose some readership, you’ll only gain more in the long run through having quality entries.

In our opening article we posted why we are doing what we’re doing so our readers know, and we have it there as a constant reminder.

Anything else?

We’re a month in and we’re still learning, so this is a small list of only some of the ideas we’ll come up with down the road. What suggestions do you have as a blogger?

They’re Easy To Read

Some of us are too busy with other things to read every word of every article all the time. There’s so much that shows up in my RSS reader that even if I tried to do that I wouldn’t find any time for work! Sometimes, we just want to get the gist of a topic and get out as quickly as we can.

Despite what Nuttall says, I rarely see posts with over twenty items that aren’t just external links to resources. Generally speaking, lists posts are short, straight to the point, and have large subtitles to skim through. If a topic really catches my eye from the subtitles, then I will go back and read the rest of it.

They Make Good Resources

Those resource lists are useful in their own way. Articles like Smashing Magazine’s “15 Fresh High-Quality Free Fonts” make great reference materials. These types of articles gather resources we may have never seen before, and some that we have, and categorize them so they are easy to find if you save them for later.

Having a collection of resources on my computer saves me valuable time when I’m doing work on other projects.

They’re Quick And Easy

… to read. You don’t have to spend hours wading through dense, poorly spaced paragraphs of text. You can read an article, get a few good ideas, relax your work muscles, and then go right back to what you were doing. Speaking of which, don’t you have work to do?