Blog Tipz

Every blogger that tries something new is essentially starting a new advertising campaign, to put it in a sense that we don’t really want to relate with. As bloggers, we want to increase traffic and get new subscribers, even though there are many risks involved whenever we change or start something new.

Blog experiments can begin with anything from changing your blog’s template, your style of writing, to more extreme and obvious examples, such as running contents, writing a series of posts, or introducing additional services to your blog.

The First Steps

First, you will have to determine what you want to do to meet your goals. Now, I can’t make generalizations about your goals, but they probably deal with increasing revenue, traffic, and/or subscribers. Depending on which you choose, you will have to plan and organize appropriately.

If your campaign will have an impact on your readers (it should, in reality), you will need to do some additional planning to ensure that everything goes as planned. Having negative feedback on your changes is one of the worst ways (in most cases) of getting your name out.

I’d suggest that you don’t avoid any minor details in this stage. Although you are only planning, you have to be sure that you don’t under- or overestimate anything dealing with the changes that you will be making.

Inside the Experiment

Because you may be impacting the success of your site, you have to be sure that you have set up tracking and ways to measure the responses of your visitors. If you see decreases in anything, at least over the week following the changes, you have to have a back-up plan to “adjust” how people viewed your site after the changes went into effect.

Invite your readers to provide feedback or write a post explaining why you made the changes.

On the other hand, if you are running a more obvious experiment, such as a contest or promotion of some sort, you can judge how people reacted by the number of sign-ups and participants in the contest. A smaller number means that less were interested, especially if it is low compared to the number of daily visitors and subscribers.

Judging the Success

Any online campaign can be a complete failure or an utter failure, depending on the person you ask. From your perspective, if you get what you wanted out of it, it was successful.

These are the key increases that I would suggest you look for after running any campaign/contest/experiment:

• An increase in subscribers.
• A slight decrease in bounce rate as more people visit your site looking for your announcement post and any recent posts.
• Traffic that increases according to the number of people sharing word about the changes.
• More comments, especially if your visitors have a strong opinion on the changes, whether good or bad.

Meeting your goals can be challenging if you haven’t done the correct planning or are running your first experiment and you haven’t yet built up your brand and image.

The main thing to remember is that not all campaigns will be successful by any standard, and you have to adjust any upcoming plans according to how your “experiment” went.