The Marketing Technology Blog

For those of you that have been long-time readers, you’ll notice that I removed the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog sidebar widgets. I struggled with removing them for quite some time. I enjoyed seeing the faces of folks that visited my blog often - it made the readers seem like real people rather than stats on Google Analytics.

I did a full analysis of each source and how they drove traffic to my site as well as how my visitors interacted on the site. Perhaps the thing I disliked the most about both widgets was:
MyBlogLog blank images. If you’re going to publish a widget that shows photos, then only show photos.
BlogCatalog images that are really advertisements for peoples’ sites. This is free advertising and it’s not what I signed up for.

Four months ago, I went through a sidebar cleansing - ridding my blog of Technorati, FuelMyBlog, and BlogRush. Technorati seems to be really working hard to focus their attention back on blogs - I hope they make a comeback. BlogRush really didn’t do anything it was hyped up to.

FuelMyBlog and BlogCatalog are still reasonably good tools for new bloggers to find new readers. MyBlogLog has drifted off into the clouds at Yahoo! and seems to have become irrelevant.

With a few thousand readers a day (by web and RSS), MyBlogLog has only brought 16 visitors to my blog:

BlogCatalog; however, brought me 58 visitors in the same period of time.

For some, that may seem like good results. The problem is that this is prime real estate on my blog. The right sidebar is where many of my regular readers interact with comments, categories, videos, etc. Not a single reader has clicked on either of the widgets on the home page… not 1.

So the questions I needed to answer were:

• What benefit were my visitors obtaining from the widgets? Not sure there was any benefit since no one interacted with them.
• What benefit was I getting from the widgets? And did those benefits outweigh the benefits my readers would have by using that space for links that they did interact with?

My conclusion was that the benefit I was getting wasn’t enough to throw away a big chunk of sidebar real estate on. I truly believe that all of these services benefit much more from your traffic than you ever will from theirs.

As a result… they are fired!

A great look at measuring contextual success with Google Analytics (rather than monetary). I came across this video when I was researching how to better track activity within Smaller Indiana with Google Analytics. Sure enough, I am able to set up goals in Google Analytics by searching the URL for specific strings in an expression. I can name the goal, in this case tracking “New Member Signups”.

Click through to the post to see the video on tracking success with Google Analytics.

Whether one calls it Digital, Online, Interactive, Viral, or Search Engine Marketing, it is still, first and foremost, marketing. And the fact is, without the full integration of strategy, creative, and analysis, your online efforts are doomed to fail.

That is why the Masters of Business Online Conference was designed with one goal in mind: To educate marketers on how to best do business online. Regardless of industry, you will hear real solutions to real business problems. You will understand how to not only set goals and objectives but how to align them with online strategies that garner success. If you are tired of attending seminars that are filled with buzz words and fluff— The Masters of Business Online Conference is for you.

Some quick examples of why you might need to attend:

• You need to prove the benefits of online marketing
• You need to decide if change is worth it
• You need to overcome the intimidation of the web as a marketing engine
• You need to realize the ROI for your website
• You need to understand the ‘generation gap’
• You need to make money online

Enter Promo Code: “DOUG” For Special $99 Rate

I will be speaking at the event, specifically to social networking and blogging. See details of all the sessions here.

Registration ENDS Wednesday - November 28! Enroll today.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a big fan of Clicky Web Analytics. It’s simply a fantastic, light-weight, no-nonsense Web Analytics program that is great for blogging. I loved it so much that I even wrote the WordPress plugin for it!

Now comes the iGoogle Clicky Dashboard by Scott Falkingham from Curious Concept:

Take all the functionality of Clicky and put it in a nice Gadget! Wow! You need not have to use the Google Gadget on your iGoogle page, either. Google Gadgets can be placed anywhere with a neat little script tag. I liked the Gadget so much that I updated the WordPress plugin and sent it off to Sean! Hopefully, he’ll release the new Admin plugin with the Gadget embedded!

To get the Gadget, go to sign up with Clicky. You can download the Gadget at Google and the WordPress plugin at the Goodies page.