April 28, 2009

Part III: Building Traffic for WordPress Dance Blogs

This post is the third and final post for my series on Building Traffic for WordPress Dance Blogs: Part I and Part II.

5) Bookmarking Tools for Your Website Visitors

All of the recommendations in this series of posts about optimizing your WordPress blog have so far dealt with how to drive traffic to your blog. It's also important to encourage your website visitors to share your content with others.

So I added the Add to Any plugin (plugin description - developer site), which lets users share your posts on popular social media sites and email links to their friends. In the screen shot below, you'll see that I choose the largest possible "Share/Save" button so that vistitors on the Dancing Interface would be strongly encouraged to share my posts:

6) Tracking Traffic with Google Analytics

Tracking and analyzing your website and blog traffic is an important and essential way to understand who is visiting your site and which content is being accessed. In addition, you can make changes to your content and layout based on trends and developments identified in your traffic reports.

Google Analytics is a popular application for tracking visitors and conversions, and generating a variety of helpful reports and charts.

Conversions, the percentage and number of people who perform a specific action, can be tracked with Google Analytics. For example, it would be very helpful to know how many people and what percentage of visitors bought a ticket for a performance, made a donation or subscribed to your email newsletter. This conversion tracking can be implemented as long as the final page in a process resides on your website or blog. For instance, ticket buyers would see a page that thanks them for purchasing a ticket.

You can watch a video introduction to Google Analytics.

For my test blog, Dancing Interface, I installed the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin (plugin description - developer site). Once this plugin is installed and configured, your Google Analytics code is automatically added to all of the pages for your blog. And then you can view your reports in Google Analytics to study your inbound and outbound traffic.

There are many ways to use Google Analystics. One way is to optimize your content on key landing pages. For example, on your blog you may have separate pages for your upcoming performances, your teaching programs, publicity materials and booking information. By using Google Analytics you can better understand how you can change both the content and layout of these pages so that that they attract larger and more targeted audiences.

Conclusion

In these three posts I've offered an overview of how to generate more targeted traffic for your WordPress blog.

Most readers will probably want to work with a web developer to design the templates for your blog and install the desired plugins. But once your blog is configured, it only takes a few minutes extra for each post to think through how you want to optimize your title, keywords and content for top search engines. This extra effort is well worth the time because it can help you generate more and better traffic for your blog and, more importantly, for your different offerings.

Overall, I think blogs will benefit most dancers and dance companies, especially if you are consistent about posting to your blog. My recommendation would be to post once a week and to always include an image or video with your posts. Posts do not have to be long--they probably shouldn't be--but should be engaging and informative.

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