Traffic analytics for my blogging business

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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about the main traffic source for DustSafetyScience.com. We also go over which pages are being viewed, what actions are being taken on the website, and how this information is being used to plan our future strategy.

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Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.

Introduction

Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #27 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics change the world through online business. We show you how to get started with blogging, podcasting, and shooting videos so you can build a profitable business and make your dent in the world.

Chris Cloney: 00:19
I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about traffic analytics for my personal blogging business at dustsafetyscience.com. This is a blog that I started while doing my Ph.D. research over three years ago now. I built it into my business before launching GradBlogger.

Chris Cloney: 00:36
The story on this one is that I recently made a big change to our content structure: the way that we’re creating content through what I call a content machine. You’ll have heard about them in the Content Machine series that includes Episode #23, #11, and #8. These are the processes I’ve used to create content and build authority in my field.

Chris Cloney: 01:01
If you listened to those episodes, you’ll know that one of the big content machines that we employ is content repurposing, specifically around news in our field.

My business at dustsafetyscience.com is about global industrial safety involving dust explosions and fires. Part of our content strategy is to:

Bring in news about these incidents as they happen and repurpose it for our audience, which is mostly engineering technical folks
Increase the value
Expand on the material to create blog posts that are a lot more high value than the original news articles.

This is a big part of our content strategy. We probably do 10 or 12 posts a week, which allows us to build a research machine around generating lessons learned from these incidents. It’s also a good content creation tool.

Chris Cloney: 01:52
Recently I wondered whether or not it was important from a traffic standpoint to report on fires. I thought people might be gravitating towards the write-ups on explosions, fireballs, and flash fires instead of structural fires or pile fires, so I decided to stop reporting on these. Now, in our newsletters and LinkedIn postings, we just post links back to the websites with the news articles. We still maintain our research database, as we use it to write reports, but we’re not making these incidents part of our content posting.

Chris Cloney: 02:29
This turned out to be a pretty bad idea. It actually hurt our traffic quite a bit on the tune of, I think, 1000 to 2000 visitors in the month that we turned it off. We’re turning that back on now after realizing our mistake.

This outcome led me to do a deep dive into our traffic analytics.

Where are our visitors coming from?
What pages are they landing on?
What actions are they taking?

I want to use the results to develop our plan moving forward. I thought this might be an interesting topic for those of you who are trying to grow your blogs and establish them as an authority in your space.

Chris Cloney: 03:00
In this episode, we’ll talk about the following:

The main traffic source for dustsafetyscience.com
What pages are being viewed
What actions are being taken on the website
What clicks are being measured
How I’m using that to plan our strategy with the blog moving forward.

There will be a lot of numbers and percentages thrown out as we go through this episode. I have a giant list here!

Chris Cloney: 03:24
If you want a summary, we put together a cheat sheet with these analytics. They cover our blog for July 2019. All the numbers that we talk about in this episode are in that cheat sheet, which you can get at GradBlogger.com/27.

Why Is It Important To Understand Your Analytics?

Chris Cloney: 03:56
Why is it important to understand your analytics? I already mentioned the big reason: so you can make smart decisions and avoid killing your traffic by closing off the wrong content source. You also want to look at is what’s working so that you can double down on it. If social sharing is working or your newsletter sharing is working (which is the case for us), or SEO is working, how do you double down on that, and how do you let go of sources that don’t work?

For instance, Twitter and Facebook don’t bring us a lot of industry traffic, so we don’t put a lot of effort and time into doing that. We focus instead on the things that are already working. How can we make them work better? This follows Pareto’s principle, where 20% of the effort that you put across gives you 80% of the results, and that’s what we’re looking to do. Where are we getting the most results, and how can we double down on that? That’s why it’s important to understand your analytics.

How is My Website Structured Today?

Chris Cloney: 04:47
My website structure includes:

A homepage
Industry membership pages where the sponsors and advertisers can sign up
A podcast page
A resources page with affiliate links
An events calendar that lists all the industry conferences, webinars, and educational opportunities

Chris Cloney: 05:18
In terms of content, we have a podcast that’s released every week, along with accompanying show notes. We also have old content posts. We haven’t been doing a lot of topic-based or how-to-based content posts for at least six months because we’ve been doing a lot of the podcasts and incident reporting through content curation re-purposing. We do have some old posts that are content pillar pieces, and we’ll talk about those.

We have the content curation, which are the news articles that we’re bringing in from media sources and government reports. Each one is reformatted and written for our target audience before being posted. This is our big content push today, along with the podcast.

Chris Cloney: 06:06
This overview gives you an idea of what some of the content pages are. The other content pages are specifically for companies that want to sign up as a member company to sponsor and advertise with us. When you click on their logos on our website, or when you click on their logos in the stuff that we post, it brings you back to their own home landing page on our website. These are all content pages as well.

Chris Cloney: 06:28
Before we get into the analytics themselves, it’s good to have an understanding of the structure of my website, as well as its purpose and goals.

One goal is awareness and education. Our goal as a company is to have a year with zero dust explosions fatalities worldwide by 2038. We’re trying to educate people and make them aware of what the safety factors are with regards to fires, flash fires, and explosions in these industries that handle combustible dust.

Chris Cloney: 06:54
But there’s also another point, which is to connect with the groups that are sponsoring and advertising with us.

The main monetization channel at the moment for DustSafetyScience is direct advertising. We talk with equipment manufacturers, consultants, experts, and service providers. For an annual fee, they have their logos included on the website and company descriptions included in different places. People can click through to their profile in the industry directory, and then click through to their websites to find out more about them.

A big part of our website is making the reader aware of the problem, educating them, and then telling them what their next steps are. Those next steps are often to connect with an equipment manufacturer or service provider in our space to help make their facility safer at the end of the day. That gives you an idea of what the website structure is like and what some of those goals are.

Chris Cloney: 07:43
I talk about a lot of the content machine aspects during the Content Machine Series episodes. The last one was Episode #23, where we talked about content curation re-purposing. This is our news reporting strategy for fires and explosions around the world. We enhance, we verify, we collect the information, and we rewrite it for our audience.

Chris Cloney: 08:07
This overview gives you an idea of what the website structure is like and what some of the goals are. I hope you can see how this might apply to your website. Maybe you’re trying to get people to sign up for a course. The action you want them to take is to go to your courses pages, learn more about you, and sign up there to build your authority in the space and expose people to what you’re creating.

Chris Cloney: 08:28
But the main point is, again, what is the purpose of your website? What are you trying to drive people to do? Then you can look at your analytics and say, how are we doing on that?

What Are The Main Traffic Sources

Chris Cloney: 08:36
Let’s get right into the analytics traffic reporting now. What are the main sources of traffic to DustSafetyScience today?

in terms of volume, DustSafetyScience is getting 4,000, or at least in July, 2019, it got 4,364 visitors, and 8,950 page views. For the last couple of months, it’s nearly been hitting 4,500 visitors, and around 9,000 page views per month.

In terms of revenue for the website, we’re right around the $100,000 mark a year between the industry directory, the reports that are released, and the sponsorship for the reports and advertising in our newsletters. That gives you an idea of the scale DustSafetyScience is currently at.

Chris Cloney: 09:30
Those are our general stats in terms of visitors and page views. We get about 2.05 views per visitor, which is just the view count divided by the visitor account. We have three main traffic sources, which are:

Street search engine traffic
Newsletter traffic
LinkedIn traffic (LinkedIn is our main social sharing platform)

What Pages Are Being Viewed?

We have our weekly newsletter, which generates a lot of clicks back to the website because of our news and content repurposing strategy. We get search engine traffic mostly on our old posts, but also a lot in our news articles as well, because they may have keywords like ‘dust explosion in Kentucky’, or ‘dust collector fire in Kentucky.’ When people type these terms into Google to find local news articles, our website will pop up to the top a lot of time in search engines.

Chris Cloney: 10:23
I mentioned that we’re getting around 9,000 page views a month. What is the split between these three different traffic sources?

In July 2019, search engines brought 2,425 people to the website, which is nearly half of that month’s traffic.
LinkedIn sharing brought in 401 people, making it 1/6th as productive as search engines.
Newsletter sharing got 2500 or so people clicking through. Newsletter sharing and search engines are nearly 50/50.

Chris Cloney: 11:12
This newsletter is pretty simple. Maybe I’ll put a link to one of the newsletters in the show notes at gradblogger.com/27 and you can see what the layout is. Currently, each edition features the following:

A small description of the podcast episode and a link.
A section for combustible dust incidents. Each one has a title and a link beside it.
Support for our members, our industry directory and membership companies.
Different events coming up.

Chris Cloney: 11:52
Although the newsletter is not super-detailed, it does take a long time to write. However, it’s a big attraction for people who want weekly news about combustible dust incidents, and we get a lot of click-throughs: around 650 per week. I think the newsletter itself goes to around 1600, 1700 people.

Key Takeaways From Traffic Analytics

Chris Cloney: 12:15
The first key takeaway from this traffic analysis is that organic search and the newsletter are the biggest sources of traffic back to the website. The search is strong and continues to grow over time. We used to get around 500 people coming through the website through search. Then it was 1,000, then 1,500, and we’re right around the 2,500 mark now. It continues to grow over time, even though we’re not creating pillar content.

Chris Cloney: 12:45
We have plans to create high-value content, such as ultimate guides, closer to the end of this year. But for the last six months, our biggest strategy has been doing news and content repurposing and curation. This has still allowed the search traffic to grow.

Chris Cloney: 13:04
A bigger key takeaway is how well the newsletter is working. It has a strong engagement, with a lot of people clicking through to the website. This is great because it means that people are learning and enjoying the content. We get a lot of emails asking questions and seeking clarification, which is a great sign that we’re on the right track.

It also means that we can get them to do things that need to be done. For example, if we need to support a community that just had a large explosion, we can get 500, 600 clicks through to that community support page or family support pages just by featuring it in our newsletter.

Chris Cloney: 13:44
We have a strong newsletter that is driving traffic week on week, so we can draw attention to important or timely matters. When we launch our Digital Dust Safety Conference in a few weeks time, we’ll probably have some episodes about that, but we’ll be able to drive a lot of traffic back to that specific thing that we’re creating, that asset we’re creating, through this newsletter.

Chris Cloney: 14:13
I’d encourage you to think about starting a newsletter if you haven’t. Like I said, you can use other people’s material. Just having a curated list of the best sources of information and blog posts on your topic is a great way to build authority and build your newsletter. If you do that for a long time, like we have for over three years now, you can achieve a great newsletter. It’s an awesome traffic source, but also can help you do big things in the world.

Chris Cloney: 14:37
That’s my analysis of the traffic sources. The next part of this episode covers what pages people are visiting on our website, what this means for our blog, and where we should go in the future.

Right now, the homepage gets around 11% of the monthly traffic. This is an important point. It means that a lot of people are coming to the homepage after they search for terms like ‘dust safety science’ or ‘dust explosion.’ However, it also means that 89% of people are landing somewhere else on the site, probably through our content pieces, and then being introduced to the website.

Chris Cloney: 15:33
Our membership page, podcast page, resources pages, and even our community calendar haven’t been getting near as much. The about page gets about 2%, membership gets about 2%, the podcast gets around 2%, the resources page (where affiliate links are) get 1.5%, and the community calendar gets 1.5%.

Chris Cloney: 15:57
The resource page is a list of textbooks, government reports, and websites that are specific to our industry. The thought is that people may click through and purchase the textbooks. We’ll talk about how many people are clicking through and how many people are purchasing the textbooks through Amazon affiliate links. You’ll see that it’s not a core revenue driver for our business.

Chris Cloney: 16:20
In terms of content, the podcasts are sitting at right around 10% of the page views per month. In July 2019, we had 878 people click through to podcast episode pages, which are the show notes. Old posts and old content pieces, got 1,474 visitors, so around 17% of our monthly traffic comes to those old posts. Those would almost certainly be search engine-driven. We do share some of this content in LinkedIn occasionally, but since LinkedIn is a small part of our overall traffic, the search engines are clearly what’s pointing back to these old posts.

Chris Cloney: 17:05
This is a good number. We probably don’t want to double down on that necessarily, although we do want to keep it in the back of our mind. And as I mentioned, moving to the rest of this year we’re thinking about how we can restructure these to make even more powerful pieces of content. I have some interesting ways that we’re going to test to stack that content into bigger pieces for our website, and we’ll get into that later in the podcast. You may hear about that over the next couple of months.

Chris Cloney: 17:35
Where are the rest of the people coming through? Well, 331 people are clicking through to our advertisers’ profile pages on the website. If you take all those numbers and subtract them from 100%, you’ll get the remainder, which are people coming in to one of the news reporting pages. In other words, one of the pages on a specific fire, flash fire, or explosion incident. That ends up being around 50% of our monthly traffic.

In the month of July, we had 4,475 people viewing one of the incident pages. You’ll notice that this is less than the traffic from our newsletter, which I think means that people are clicking through in the newsletter, reading the post, I think the average time on site is around one minute and twenty seconds, so they’re reading that post, and then at the bottom they see that we have related posts.

Chris Cloney: 18:31
Maybe the post is about a fire in Kentucky, and maybe the bottom has links to reports about a dust collector explosion in Kentucky or a fire in Cincinnati. When they get to the bottom and see a related article about a topic that’s relevant to them, I believe they’re clicking through and reading the next post as well. That’s how our number of page visits for this type of posts is much higher than the traffic that’s coming through on them.

That’s a big insight. If I had thought of that or known that before we turned off fire reporting, we probably could have guessed that was going to have a big impact on our traffic, and we should probably put that back on.

Key Takeaways From Page View Analytics

Chris Cloney: 19:10
This all gives you an idea of where people are landing on our website, when they’re coming in, and what pages they’re viewing.

For me, one of the key takeaways that our homepage needs a better design. We’re getting around 10% of the website traffic going straight to the homepage. This is 982 people a month. The question is: where are they going from there?

I think they may be clicking on specific incidents, but the incidents are like the tentacles of an octopus, if you will. That’s where we want people coming into our website: these are not the core things we want people to do when they get there. When people get there, I want them to become aware of dust hazards, become educated on them, and connect with the right groups to take the next steps. And our homepage is not designed that way.

Chris Cloney: 19:54
As we write out these pillar articles over the next couple of months, we’re going to take a new look at the homepage and see how we can take the 1,000 people that are landing there per month and get them more integrated with the topic of dust explosions, so that they then go and visit our sponsors and advertisers and take the next steps to get prevention put in place or maybe sign up for a course or for our annual conference. That’s a big part of the takeaway from where people are landing: our home page needs a better design because a lot of people are still landing there.

Chris Cloney: 20:28
Other big takeaways include the sidebar on our post pages. Right now, it mostly has links to our sponsors’ pages. These links should probably go to the company profile pages on our site and not drive traffic offsite.

Chris Cloney: 20:57
Another big key takeaway is that the related articles at the bottom of the incident pages are working well. I mentioned this already. People land on the incidents, they go to the bottom, and then they click through to a related incident.

Chris Cloney: 21:12
We covered the first two aspects of traffic analytics. The first one was traffic sources. This was mostly from our newsletter and search engines. The second was landing pages. About 10% of visitors went to the homepage. A small percentage went to some of the other major pages. But most of the traffic is landing on these content curation and content repurposing pages through our fire, flash fire, and explosion incidents. Up to 50% of all monthly traffic is landing there.

Now the question is: how do we get those visitors to take a specific journey when they visit the site?

What Reader Actions Are Being Taken?

Chris Cloney: 21:53
The last topic I want to discuss is the actions readers are taking when they get to the blog.

The goals of DustSafetyScience are twofold. Number one is to build authority as a research company within the space and me as a thought leader in the space. It’s working, too. I can tell because when we release our incident reports and our other assets, take on direct advertisers, and do speaking engagements, people are reading the website and coming through. We are building this authority.

Chris Cloney: 22:20
The second big thing is getting people to click through to our company profile pages. Those are the only two actions. We also have the resources page, and we’ll talk about that as an action as well.

Key Takeaways From Reader Action Analytics

Chris Cloney: 22:32
What actions are people taking? In July, 2019, we had 104 affiliate links on the resources page. We use a couple of ways to track this. One is the Geni.us. It’s a tool that you can use to mask your Amazon affiliate link. When you plug in all your Amazon affiliate programs for every country, depending on where the person that’s clicking is clicking from, it’ll take them to that Amazon affiliate program. If there is a click in Italy, they’ll go to the Italy Amazon affiliate program for that book or whatever they’re clicking on. If they’re in the U.S., they’ll go through that program.

If you tried to sign up for multiple Amazon affiliate accounts, you’ll notice that it’s quite difficult depending on what country you’re targeting, and you have to sign up for them. This Geni.us tool, lets you put one link that will redirect them to where they need to go, and then the analytics and reporting are what we use to see how many people are clicking on the links.

Chris Cloney: 23:37
We had 104 affiliate link clicks, but nobody purchased any of the affiliate products. We didn’t get any sales from affiliate links in July 2019. That just goes to show that affiliate links are a volume game, and when you have an expert niche website like I do, you’re not necessarily going to have the volume. Maybe there’s something we can do with other types of products down the road, and we’re still playing with that, but today we’re just not getting any revenue, or not very much revenue at least, from affiliate links.

Chris Cloney: 24:07
The other action that we have is clicking through from the company profile pages to their websites. Again, the person lands on our website, they become educated, they find a member company that fits their needs, and then they click through that member company to find out more. In July, 2019, we had 154 people click through to a member company through one of the profile pages.

Chris Cloney: 24:32
This is a pretty good number: six per sponsor per month, is an annual cost per click value of around $30, which is a little bit on the high end, but some of the top keywords in our space have a $30-$40 cost-per-click.

Things like ‘dust hazard analysis,’ ‘explosion testing,’ and ‘combustible dust testing’ are highly competitive and commercialized keywords, but the costs per click aren’t that high. With some of these redesigns I’m talking about, I think we can probably double or even quadruple the number of people who are clicking through to the company websites.

Chris Cloney: 25:17
The other big point is that there are only 331 page views for these profiles. 46% of the people who land on a company profile are clicking through to that company’s website. That’s a good indication that when they land there, they’ve been educated, and now they’re engaged and they want to know what the next steps are. That’s a win. The total number that we have is, I think, still a win, but something that we can increase and move forward on in the future.

Chris Cloney: 25:43
This gives you a summary of the actions people are taking on the website and what it means for the blog, what it means for getting the word out there, what it means for safety, and what it means for our business.

What Am I Going To Double Down On?

Chris Cloney: 25:54
I want to close out by talking about some things that I’m going to be doing moving forward, based on this analysis of the traffic analytics for our website. I have noted four different things that I’m going to be looking at doing almost right away, or at least in the next couple of months. The first of these is to turn on reporting on fires again.

Start Reporting On Fires Again

Chris Cloney: 26:11
We turned it off as a test. It was quite expensive to have the team analyze these incidents. We write up, review, share them every month, generate this whole content machine, and roll it out. We have a process put in place, and it is pretty streamlined.

We turned it off to see what the impact was going to be, and it turns out that it’s actually a key driver of content to our website. As one of my mentors put it, it’s like an octopus, where the content you’re putting out there is the tentacles. You want to bring people back to your website, and then back to the core things that you want them to do on your website. The tentacles are working well, and we need to turn the fire reporting back on in order to drive that traffic back to the website.

Redesign Homepage Flow To Lead To The Right Actions

Chris Cloney: 26:53
The second thing that we’re going to do is redesign the homepage. As I said, I wasn’t sure how many people were landing there specifically, but we do have at least a thousand people a month. When I look at it, I think, “Well, what are they going to do?”

It appears from the analytics that they click on one of the incident reports and go through those fires, flash fires, and explosions, which isn’t the direction we want people to take. It’s like they’re now landing on the head of the octopus, and we’re taking them out to the tentacles. We want to have them go back to the head as well.

Utilize Sidebar Better

Chris Cloney: 27:27
The third thing is that we need to utilize sidebars better. Right now we just have dead sidebars with logos that link to the company profile pages, which I think are pretty good. We’re getting a decent amount of click-throughs. But I think putting other things in the sidebars, such as where they can find our pillar article content, the resources page, or the community calendar would be a high-leverage way to drive people back to what we want them to do.

Start Creating Pillar Article Content

Chris Cloney: 28:01
The fourth thing that we’re going to do is start working on this pillar content again. Start working on creating these epic ultimate guideposts that can keep our SEO increasing over time. We seem to stagnate a little bit around the 2,500 mark. It is still going up a bit with the content curation repurposing and podcasts, but I know there are specific keywords in our field that are getting a couple thousand searches a month.

I’m pretty sure that by creating this content, doing some link-building around it, and creating the best material on that topic, we can get up into the first, second, or third spots on Google pretty quickly. Over time, we can bring those extra thousands of people back to the website with this content.

Chris Cloney: 28:48
It’s important to note that this pillar content is exactly what we want to put on the homepage to get people aware of the combustible dust hazards, educate them, and then tell them the next steps they need to take. We’re integrating that into our strategy moving forward, and we’ll probably be talking about that on a future podcast episode.

Chris Cloney: 29:03
Those are the four things I’m looking to do: start reporting on fires again, redesign the homepage, utilize the sidebar better, and start creating this pillar article content.

Conclusion

Chris Cloney: 29:21
That’s it for this episode, where we’re talking about the traffic analytics for my blogging business. I hope this was insightful for you. I know there are a ton of numbers that we shared here, so I put it all into a one-page cheat sheet that you can download at GradBlogger.com/27.

Chris Cloney: 29:50
The point isn’t to measure your website against these goals, or even to compare. You could have a website that has quite a bit more traffic than we do and not generate the same revenue, and you could have a website that has a lot less traffic and generating more revenue. The point is to show you one set of data on how this can be impacting your blog and your business and show you some key insights like:

The power of the newsletter and podcast to drive traffic
The importance of building these content machines using things like content curation and repurposing
How you can use those in your blog as you develop your business

Chris Cloney: 30:34
I encourage you to share this episode on social media if you found it helpful. Tag @GradBlogger on Twitter, Instagram, or wherever you’re sharing. You can send me an email at Chris@gradblogger.com and ask me questions. You can go to the show notes at gradblogger.com/27 and leave your comments there. You can also get the cheat sheet or the transcripts for this episode.

I hope you have a great week ahead and have lots of success building out your content machines, your blog, your authority, and your business moving forward, and that GradBlogger can play a role in doing that.

Resources

Companies:
DustSafetyScience
GradBlogger: Twitter | Instagram
Sample DSS Newsletter

Tools:
Geni.us

Previous Podcasts:
GBP023- Content curation and repurposing (The Content Machine Series)
GBP011- Using three-minute papers to drive traffic to your site (The Content Machine series)
GBP008- Using random topic blogging as your first content machine (The Content Machine Series)

Traffic analytics for my blogging business | GBP027

Introduction