Lijit

You’ve been told that it’s important to know about your audience. What audience? Oh, you know, just all those people that are visiting your site to read your fantastic content. With Lijit stats, you already have some of that information right at your fingertips. But let’s say you want to find out something specific about your readers or ask them a question…maybe you want to find out what they think you should be writing about or what color they think your theme should be.

Enter SurveyGizmo. And yes, they are another company here in Boulder that we love.

Founded in 2006, SurveyGizmo emerged to fill a gap in the survey software market between high-priced market research software and online tools that did not include the required flexibility or features to conduct complex surveys. They quickly found their niche and have been growing ever since.

But how can SurveyGizmo help you as a blogger? Simply put, you can use their software to understand your audience further by gathering data about your readers with surveys, polls and forms.

SurveyGizmo can act as a dynamic contact form for your site. For example, this embedded contact form on the SurveyGizmo site is an example of a super easy way to collect detailed contact information that you might be interested in. If you notice, as you click on each radio button, you can see how the contact form changes to accomodate each request type, and generally helps SurveyGizmo users gather more useful information about the people visiting your site.

Also, bloggers can choose to poll their readers about what content they’d like to see more of, such as this example…

The best part of all is that SurveyGizmo gives you a free trial so that you can test out their software on your own. With a variety of different plans available, from the most basic to the enterprise and dedicated levels, there’s sure to be something there to suit your surveying needs. And, should you run into trouble, SurveyGizmo’s customer service and support are top-notch.

Check out what our friends at SurveyGizmo have to offer and let them help you to understand your readers better!

We love supporting our local community.

BlogFrog is a Boulder startup doing something different for bloggers - allowing them to create instant community on their blogs by letting readers connect, interact and share content. BlogFrog is like attaching a social network to your blog.

If you’re wondering where you’ve seen BlogFrog before, the answer be found in the sidebar of your favorite mommyblogger. BlogFrog widgets are all over the place - by initially serving women and mom bloggers, BlogFrog has become the largest network of mom blogs on the Internet. (You do know about these mom blogs, yes?)

With BlogFrog, it’s easy to create a forum where readers can ask questions, post links and extend the conversation beyond a specific blog post. And that’s not all. BlogFrog communities can help drive traffic, generate more revenue and increase loyalty among visitors.

Signing up is super quick and painless. Over on the right there, you can see that we’re rocking our widget in the sidebar and we’d love for you to check out our BlogFrog community. We’re just starting out, so if you have any questions or discussions you’d like to start, we encourage you to help get the party started.

For more about BlogFrog, you can read their blog, check out their community, follow them on Twitter or shoot Holly an email. See what BlogFrog can do for you and your blog readers.

And stay tuned…we’re excited to share one more Boulder company with you before the year is out.

With so much content being created everyday online, it can be difficult to find quality writing amongst all the noise. Enter Scribnia, a new startup that features a community built around online authors. After just a little digging around on their site, I’m of the opinion that this is one service that is long overdue.

From their homepage…

“Scribnia is all about the writers. We aim to be the definitive source for people’s opinions about bloggers, columnists, reporters and other writers whose work is available online. Scribnia allows you to rate your favorite (and least favorite) writers and discover new authors that match your unique tastes.“

The beauty of Scribnia is that they’re essentially offering a two-fold benefit. When on their site, you can search for authors, see who has been highly rated and read other users’ reviews. Scribnia’s ‘context ratings’ allow for deep filtering of authors based on criteria you deem important and after you’ve rated a few authors, Scribnia’s recommendation engine will do the work for you. If you’re in the market for a discovery engine, you’ve got the makings of a great one within the Scribnia community.

But wait…Scribnia does more. By creating an author profile on the site, you can also get a widget to put on your blog, asking for feedback about your writing. This means that readers can write public reviews and rate your writing. Other Scribnia members will be able to access these reviews and contribute their own ratings. Sounds like a fantastic way to drive new traffic to your blog…and get a better idea of what people like about your writing.

Scribnia is a free service and their employees will go out of their way to help (I’m looking at you David and Saad!). Since they’re still in beta, Scribnia is asking for any and all feedback about what they’re doing. To learn more, check out the Scribnia blog and follow them on Twitter.

If you’re a writer, I strongly suggest you give Scribnia a look. And if you decide to sign up, I’m tarable over there too.

We like to share companies and services with you that provide value. Partnerpedia is just such a company. They first came to our attention at Chicks Who Click-San Jose, but we really got the chance to talk when Partnerpedia showed up on the expo floor of Blog World this year. Launched in June 2008, Partnerpedia was designed as a way to help channel partners more easily find, recruit and collaborate with one another. Consider it similar to a business social media site like LinkedIn. Basically, being part of Partnerpedia allows companies to increase their business through building a partner network.

According to Vanessa Ho, Partnerpedia’s online community manager, Partnerpedia is specially geared towards small and medium-sized companies that want to create a partner portal but don’t have the resources or capabilities to develop such a thing on their own. In addition to their free service, Partnerpedia also offers enterprise-level companies a paid solution that includes private label branding, metrics, reporting and customer integration with social media channels.

Ho also mentioned that the company has recently launched the beta of their Partnerpedia for Salesforce CRM application that will allow Salesforce CRM users to distribute leads to a partner and track the opportunity throughout its sales cycle. Additional features include automatic notifications to keep users up-to-date and a partner finder to easily locate solution providers.

It’s easy to sign up for Partnerpedia (you can see that we managed to do it) and once you do, companies can create their partner profile, upload documents and publish articles, collaborate on documents and work on specific projects with other Partnerpedia members. If you’re looking for interesting new ways of growing your business, Partnerpedia might be just the answer to find different and strategic partners with which to market your company.

Every year, since 2004, Technorati has published the State of the Blogosphere report. The State of the Blogosphere report is considered the best up to date source of information about size, motivations, and practices of long tail publishers.

This year, Lijit helped Technorati by supplying some information from within the blogs that make up the Lijit Network. Lijit performed the analysis on the raw data and only supplied the aggregate insights documented in this post.

Analysis was centered on four distinct areas of interest including Search Engine Referrals, Blogroll Promotion, the Impact of Twitter, Advertising and Analytics.

Methodology

Data for this post was collected from two primary sources both directly collected by Lijit.

The first source of data was the ~11K active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their publications. Lijit builds a unique search corpus for each publisher. This search corpus includes the publisher’s publication, his user-generated content, and the network of the publishers who influence the publisher (i.e., his Blogroll). This network of influencers results in a crawl footprint of over 2.5M publications that we actively index in order to maintain the search functionality on the 11K publisher sites. The second source of data used in this post comes from information gathered on those 2.5M sites in the extended network.

Data was reduced to something we refer to as the ‘typical publisher’. For some measurements, some publishers were omitted from the sample when in our opinion the specific publisher or publishers represented a singularity in the data that masked the typical publisher substantially. In addition, for some of the analysis points, we removed publications with less than 100 page views a day. Where lower page view publishers were removed we point it out. As page views drop into lower numbers some of the data begins to skew and it begins to get difficult to distinguish active and inactive publishers.

Search Engine Referrals

A typical site within the Lijit publisher network receives 27% of its page views from clicks on results in horizontal search engine result pages. As expected, the highest single source of referrals to the typical publisher site is Google at 23.5%. Yahoo and Bing were next, accounting for about 3.2% of referrals. Twitter and Facebook were nearly identical and total about 1.6% of traffic.

Lijit categorizes publications into 23 topical/vertical subject areas. The Tech vertical saw the highest percent of page views from search engine referrals at 41%. The remaining topical areas were fairly consistent with regards to percent referrals.

The percent of page views that come from search engine referrals is fairly constant with the audience size of the publication. The exception to this are publications of less than 100 page views a day that receive a slightly larger percent of page views from search engine referrals at around 30%.

It’s unclear why smaller publications get a larger percent of page views from search engine referrals, but may be linked to the ever growing length of horizontal search engine queries. According to a Hitwise January 2009 Search report, over 50% of queries are now 3 terms or more on the major horizontal search engines. This suggests that as the length of the average query string gets longer, more referrals get passed to smaller publications due to the specificity of the queries. This is a positive trend for smaller publishers.

Blogroll Promotion

Based on the 2.5M publications crawled by Lijit, the number of blogs in the average blogroll is 47, a surprisingly high number. Although not always a prominent feature on a publisher’s site, cross promotion of bloggers by other bloggers is clearly a significant factor in publication readership growth.

The typical publication within the Lijit network of 2.5M sites appears in 6.4 other Blogrolls. In other words, the typical blog is pointed to by 6.4 other blogs. The difference between a blog appearing in 6.4 other Blogrolls and pointing to an average of 47 other blogs is largely due to blogs pointing outside of the Lijit crawl footprint. The Blogosphere is a very large place.

The Impact of Twitter

Publications with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 0.83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This percent tracked very closely to Facebook referrals at 0.80%. Publications below 100 page views a day saw a higher percent of page views from Twitter referrals than Facebook referrals.

Besides horizontal search engines, Twitter is the largest driver of referrals to the typical publication.

Lijit Search aggregates user-generated content that a publisher generates, into search results that display on the publisher’s site. Aggregating this content around a publisher’s site creates a stronger brand association for the reader with that publisher and site.

The most common user-generated content source included within a Lijit Search profile is Twitter. About 50% of Lijit publishers include Twitter in their Lijit Search results. This is a change from prior years. In 2007, 26.6% of publishers included Twitter as a content source in their Lijit Search results. In 2008, 42% of Lijit accounts included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results. In 2009, 50% of publishers included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results.

Twitter was by far the fastest growing content source to be included by Lijit publishers. Clearly, publishers embrace the micro-blog format. Going forward, Lijit intends to track the percent of publishers that use Twitter for blog post promotion as we suspect this number is quite high.

Advertising and Analytics

As Lijit crawls the extended network of publications, we track the widgets and tags we find on those publications. For the first time, Quantcast overtook Google Analytics as the most frequent analytics tag found on publications. This is likely due to Quantcast tags being included in some publishing platform templates.

Comparing 2008 to 2009, there has been a 68% increase in the number of sites with Ad tags installed. This indicates to us that monetizing sites is high on the priority list of most publishers.

Last year, when we ran the analysis, Google Ad tags made up 67% of the Ad tags found. This year that percentage has dropped to 47%, indicating publishers are experimenting with other Ad networks. This is probably not an indication of publishers leaving Google but rather publishers trying other Ad networks and using Google at the end of the Ad rotation.

More Data to Come…

With Lijit’s install footprint of 11K active installed base and a crawl footprint of 2.5M publications, Lijit is becoming the defacto source of information from within publications. Starting in 2010 Lijit will publish a more comprehensive study of what’s happening inside the Blogosphere.

I write. A lot. And as I’ve done this blogging thing now for quite a few years, with 1000’s of posts now under my belt and submitted to the open interwebs for lurkers and loyal readers alike to enjoy, I’ve learned a few things:

a) Man, that’s a lot of posts. How the hell do I get people to enjoy my old stuff?

b) Man, I want people to HANG OUT on my site a while! How do I keep ‘em from leaping off too soon while trying to add color to my content with external links or anchoring text?

As it pertains to a) let’s just say that I discovered a little gem to help my readers do just that. Sometime in 2007 I started using Lijit Search and featured it prominently on my main blog and my other various blogs and sites I manage. Readers immediately started exploring my older content by searching for content and Lijit would take them directly to it where it lay on my blog as well as my social media content and where it lay on my friends sites via my trusted social graph. I liked it so much, I just HAD to work there (although I cannot say “I liked it so much I bought the company…ha!).

Now as it relates to b) there’s a lot of strategy that goes on by bloggers to keep those precious time-on-site metrics ticking ever longer. Ultimately, keeping folks on your site is about your content…good content…that engages readers and fundamentally shows who you really are. But very often it is about other content…content that can and should be used to help punctuate points within your posts and typically done by referencing something external to your site via hyper-linking. Yet the world of hyper-linking fundamentally jeopardizes time-on-site goals desired by bloggers because people LEAVE!

Enter: The Apture Experience.

All over this post and any of my blogs are examples of what Apture provides. The product offered by this Bay Area company essentially satisfies point b) above by creatively and elegantly displaying these punctuation points you desire to add color to your posts. Have a YouTube video that reminds you perfectly of that prose-like sentence you just wrote? Use Apture to link to it and pop up on your site. Have that perfect image that can elicit an emotive reaction to your text? Link to it with Apture and have it too pop up on your site. The installation of Apture caused zero brain damage (installed in ~2-3 minutes) and is just as easy to use. Once a post is either published or in a pre-published state, simply select text and allow Apture to search for similar content on the internet or input specific URLs to explicitly pop up content you desire.

Apture is so similar to Lijit in our focus on creating powerful tools for our publishers which at their core both help inspire and engage readers more thoroughly with your content. Lijit helps mine and discover content, Apture helps expose and punctuate your content with it. Like peanut butter and jelly. 

Finally, as blogger AND a manufacturer of publisher tools for our community. I am truly inspiring you to take a look at Apture and the types of features it can provide for your readers to creatively punctuate your content while ensuring the enjoyment of said content happens directly on YOUR site, keeping readers engaged and entertained post after post. Open up the “Apture” for your readers and keep ‘em engaged!