Three Common Metrics to Measure Your Blog’s Success

Ellen asked:

I use Google Analytics and am looking for a good article on the 3-5 most important things to track. I can get so lost looking at the data and imagining what it means and what to do about it.

Let’s start at some basics and in future posts we can provide some deeper knowledge. (hint, Jeffrey Kishner!)

Blog Traffic

No one wants to answer this question. What kind of traffic do you need to “arrive” as a substantial blog? What would it take to become something like Sasstrology, the number astrology blog on the net?

Different internet gurus sling about page hits, page views, and unique visitors. Most advertisers are looking for unique visitors, actual people, not spyders or bots that are reading your page. From my experience to place as a notable blog, an authoritative source, you need to break the 100 unique visitor per day mark or 3,000 unique visitors per month. Sasstrology on the other hand has nearly 26,000 unique visitors per month.

That being said, the niche for astrology blogging is very small and even blogs with a few hundred page views per month rate on invesp.com.

Bounce Rate

If someone comes to visit you in your home, you’d like them to stay a while, not bounce right in and out the door. Bounce rate measures whether or not people are staying to look at your content.

One website says this about bounce rate

average bounce rates are 30% and anything above 50% is bad and below 20% is awesome.

There is quick disclaimer that every industry is different, so when it comes to an astrology blog, given the diversity of the material out there a higher bounce rate might not be as bad as you might think.

All that being said, if your bounce rate is below 50% you are doing well.

Length of Time on Page

Once some has come to visit, and decided to stay, the next thing to work on is getting them to stay longer. Again this is an advertising metric, but it also is a measure of how engaging your content is. There is huge variable in the length of time on page from website to website and industry to industry.

As you get more into making money from your blog, you will be motivated to add features and items to entice people to linger over your posts. One insightful blogger noted that when she added YouTube videos to a page she got more revenue through clicks on the ads simply because Google paid higher rates to pages that had a longer length of time on the page.

Again, there is no standard here, but if people spend an average of 2:50 minutes you are doing something right to engage your audience.

Well, Miss Beth, How Do You Improve These Measurements?

If there was a magic bullet to improve any of these things someone would have bottled it and made their first billion dollars. The answer lies not in one strategy, but many. Like one of my corporate bosses used to say “Throw enough mud on the wall and something will have to stick.”

So my next post will be “Mud Slinging”

Photo printed under a Creative Commons License as posted on Flickr.

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Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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Blogging vs. Website–The Importance of Social Interaction in Promoting Astrology

By Jamie Funk

This topic came up recently in a Facebook discussion, which arose from a post on the astrology of the Google Buzz launch. I said that “the leading internet astrologers” are jumping onboard. Defining “leading Internet astrologers” was the next step. This is distinct from the leading astrologers who author books, lecture at conferences or have websites with educational information, but who do not actively engage with others on the internet. To clarify I’ll give a few examples. From the popular culture style of astrology, Elsa Panizzon and Jeffrey Kishner are leading internet astrologers who engage with their user base at their blogs and forums. From the more traditional side of astrology, Noel Tyl and Deborah Houlding would be considered leading Internet astrologers because they engage with their forum members.

Blogs and forums have not been around so long, maybe a decade. Some astrologers are into it and some are not, that’s OK. Books, lectures and websites are an essential source of information for people learning about astrology, but these days the Internet is all about two-way interaction, making new contacts and sharing our ideas. It is making the world a smaller place and lets us form relationship, which would have otherwise been impossible. So the astrological community is part of this process. New people drawn to astrology are more likely to stay with it if they can interact with astrologers at all levels and share their ideas and get feedback.

The Internet is great for astrology in general. It makes so much information freely available but we need to be able to discuss it, debate what is being posted. I have read a fair few articles that I think are misleading at the very least but there is nowhere to leave comments. Time will tell, but I think lecturing style of astrology on the Internet will become less relevant. Ideas need to be challenged for any philosophy to evolve, and the Internet is the perfect medium for this evolution to occur quickly.

Astrology itself has now become a medium for social interaction on the Internet. I’m sure Marina and I are not the first couple to have met in this way. Friendships are started everyday all over the world in astrology forums and networking sites like Facebook. This is promoting astrology more into the mainstream than classes or conferences could ever have done. The language of this social interactions is astrology, whether it’s comparing sun signs for beginners, or sharing thoughts on the secondary progressions of a composite chart for full on astro nerds like me.

What it really comes down to is that people are going to be more drawn to astrology and end up promoting it themselves, if they can interact with others more experienced. Forums seem to be a bit limited in this. Just my personal intuition, but I think the explosion in the number of astrology bloggers is a sign that this community is moving toward a new level of social interaction. The comments on blog article are life forum threads, just like comments on personal pages or fan pages on Facebook. The advantage of blogs articles is that they are not lost in the ocean of babble on forums, and they are indexed on blogs and on the search engines. These are becoming the new reference material for astrologers, more so than books even. It does promote astrology in the best fashion I believe, and most importantly it is available to anyone in the world who has access to a computer, regardless of his or her socio-economic status.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License from Flickr

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About the Author


Jamie Funk hangs his blogging hat at “Funkastrology–Cutting Edge Astrology for Uranian Times which he shares with his fiance Marina. Funkastrology has been listed in The Mountain Astrologer as a hot blog to watch. Of course it is!

How to Make Money From an Astrology Blog

by Jeffrey Kishner

There are many reasons why astrologers blog, and making money directly from blogging is probably the last thing on our minds. For many of us, just the act of sharing our love for astrology with the community is reason enough to self-publish. However, the joy of writing is often not our only motivation.

Self-Promotion

Yes, many astrologers want to earn a living from … being an astrologer. In the internet age, an easy way to promote our practices is via blogging. Free blogs are easy to set up on Blogger or WordPress, and with the help of great aggregation sites like AstroDispatch, getting your blog exposed to the larger astrological community is not so difficult.

We often attract just those clients who need our services, and blogging helps readers to suss out whether they resonate with your approach to astrology and consulting. All you have to do is include an About page, and include your contact information so they can reach out to you. Or better yet, use a form to allow potential clients to send you their birth data and specific concerns.

Advertising

You can make money from ads, but there’s no point in even bothering if you don’t have a significant amount of traffic. The easiest way to earn cash is from Google Adsense. You just choose an ad size and plop some code into your blog template. (Blogger will automate this for you.) Google analyzes the content of your blog and includes ads that are relevant to your readers. But be forewarned: if your blogging is not tightly focused on astrology, your ads may often be off-topic. If your blog includes some posts about astrology and some about your knitting hobby, the ads served by Google could be judged irrelevant by your readers, and this can ultimately hurt your reputation. (Readers are often OK with ads if they perceive those ads as being useful.)

You can also join an ad publishing network. These networks “collect” lots of blogs under one umbrella so that they can convince major brands to advertise within their network. Big ad networks can command high CPM (cost per thousand page impressions) ads, and they often split the revenue with you 50/50.

Affiliate Programs

The cost-per-transaction model is low-risk for sellers, as they only pay you when one of your readers purchase their product. One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon Associates. If you love a particular astrology book, you can easily create a widget and post it on your blog. If a reader buys it, you get a 4% commission. Frankly, you’re only going to earn pennies from Amazon if you publish an astrology blog. The big earners are folks who blog about digital cameras and other high-price items.

The big astrology sites have affiliate programs. Astrology.com, Tarot.com and Matrix Software pay you a commission if your reader purchases an astrology report from their site. (Matrix pays higher commissions than the former two.) You can also join affiliate programs like Commission Junction and ClickBank. These programs feature more obscure astrology sites that pay a commission if your reader purchases a report, an ebook or a physical object like an astrology-themed bracelet. However, you ought to inspect the specific product to make sure it’s not crap. If you refer a reader to purchase something that makes astrology look bad, you’ll look bad, too.

Sell Your Own Reports

Many professional astrology software products have modules that enable you to print out customized natal, compatibility and transit reports for clients. These modules come with “canned” interpretations written by professional astrologers. You can often whip out a PDF report in a minute or two. This is a pretty easy way to earn extra cash.

You can also write your own interpretations. You can charge a pretty penny for these reports ($40-$60). The consumer is buying your report because she values your specific expertise and writing style. Of course, this option is much more labor-intensive, but over time it can be lucrative. In addition, having written your own astrology report boosts your reputation.

Approach Advertisers Directly, or Have Them Approach You

If your blog gets big enough, potential advertisers or sponsors will reach out to you, because they want to capture the attention of your readers. Or you can directly contact businesses whose products would be of interest to your readers. It helps to have demographic information about your readers. You can register with Quantcast to provide stats about your readers, or you can use SurveyMonkey to ask your readers specific questions (age, gender, household income, etc.). Armed with this data, you may be able to convince a company to be a direct advertiser. This way, you don’t have to split your profits with an ad network.
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About the Author

Jeffrey Kishner is editor/publisher of Sasstrology. He is also a regular contributor at AOL Horoscopes. Jeffrey is available for professional consultations regarding WordPress blogs and social media optimization. You can contact him at jeffreykishner@gmail.com.
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SEO Tips: Using Google Analytics to Increase Traffic

Editor’s note: When Jeffrey Kishner, publisher of the number one astrology blog on the internet, Sasstrology offers to write a post for Astro Blogging, you’d be crazy to say no. And I wouldn’t, ever. Thanks, Jeffrey!.

by Jeffrey Kishner

The success of my current blog, Sasstrology, is partially a fluke. A few years ago, I was blogging regularly at Lunar Tunes Astrology. Most of my posts were about the New and Full Moons. However, I found – through the use of a blog statistics tool like Google Analytics – that many of my new readers found the blog by searching for stuff like, “How to get a Scorpio man interested.” Although I never explicitly wrote about the astrology of seduction, there was enough content in my blog posts (and from reader comments) that Google matched its googlers with my blog.

On a lark, I decided to try an experiment: start a new blog, and just write posts based on these romance-related google searches. Seduction Central – “the blog formerly known as Sasstrology” – was born, and it thrived.

Why? Because I was taking advantage of the long tail. Many folks may google “Taurus man,” but not as many google “How to get my Taurus man to come back to me.” Since I wrote blog post titles that targeted these less frequent search queries, my posts were more likely to rise to the top in these searches.

How to Find Long-Tail Searches Using Google Analytics

Once you sign up, follow the instructions in Googles Installation Guidefor installing the tracking code. There is also a plug-in for self-hosted WordPress Blogs. Unfortunately, you cannot install the tracking code on blogs hosted on WordPress.com.

When you scroll down, you’ll see the phrases that readers used to find your blog via a search engine. For example, the screenshot below shows the top 10 searches that include the phrase, “Taurus man.”

If I wanted to attract some good blog traffic, I’d write, “How to make a Taurus man propose.”

Of course, the types of posts you’d want to write about would be related to your current blog content, so instead of “Taurus man,” you might find searches like, “North Node conjunct Midheaven.” It is of primary importance that you cater to your current readers more than to Google, so don’t just write a post based on analytics. However, looking at keyword searches is a great way to find what your prospective readers are looking for, which will help you write content that both satisfies your fans and brings in new ones.

About the Author
Jeffrey Kishner is editor/publisher of Sasstrology. He is also a regular contributor at AOL Horoscopes. Jeffrey is available for professional consultations regarding WordPress blogs and social media optimization. You can contact him at jeffreykishner@gmail.com.