Consider Carefully What Name You Use to Comment

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Lorell VanFossen has a great post up over at the Blog Herald asking the question What Do You Put in the Name of a Comment Form?

It is something to consider carefully.

As Lorelle points out you have three basic choices of what to enter in that field when you leave a comment. You can type in your name, your blog title, or some key words.

Your Name

Personally I’m a fan of the first choice. After all the field normally has the label “Name” beside it! In my mind it just makes sense to use my name.

Blogging, even business blogging, is first and foremost about people. And unless you happen to be in some weird Tibetan Monk movie we all have been given a name.

Since you are the person leaving the comment, then it makes sense that you would identify yourself with your name.

Now I can understand there are cases where folks may have good reasons to use a pseudonym. Writing is a huge part of blogging and writers have been using pen names for centuries.

It is probably a good idea to be consistent.

You have reasons to use different personas? That’s fine by me.

Just keep in mind that if you don’t speak with a consistent voice with whatever persona you are using at the time you will likely confuse folks and come across as a bit of a flake. Read more

Fun With Search Terms

Have you ever taken some time to look at how people are coming to your blog?

I just did.

I poked around in the various statistical packages that I run here at SuccessCREEations to find out how people are getting here. I normally peek at StatCounter pretty regularly to get a feel for numbers of page view and such but tonight I wanted to go deeper than my account there will let me see.

So I started with Google Analytics. There is a ton of information that can be gleaned there, although I did run into a challenge with the site resetting to another domain where I also run GA and making it hard to get the data about this blog here.

But I digress.

It turns out that right now about 12% of the traffic coming here is direct - either from bookmarks or from people typing in a URL in their address bar. 56% is coming in from referring sites. Those sites include blogs that have a link here, online feed readers like BlogLines, email links (probably from the email feed), etc.

The balance of the traffic that finds its way to SuccessCREEations, about 32% of the total, comes from the various search engines. And it is this last number that I took a closer look at. Read more