Since my last post introd
ucing our data-driven blog platform I started creating a dashboard consisting of about 20 or so reports to demonstrate the functionality of our data-driven blog platform, and one thing became quickly evident. Effectively illustrating the capabilities of our analytics technology using the
NetEffect Services blog as the example is difficult because there just isn’t enough activity to report on, being so new.
You can see here:
The report above shows the “Daily Blog Post Views,” and as you would expect the activity is very light given we just launched it a week ago. Admittedly, it’s not very exciting.
Do I have a volunteer? Sweeeet.
In need of an active blog with some significant amount of traffic to measure I asked a good friend of mine,
Bill Seaver, author of
MicroExplosion.com if he’d consider a migration of his social media blog to our platform so we could use it as the subject of our data-driven blog case study. I explained how our platform could measure valuable information including:
- blog post views
- visitor view trends
- visitor comment trends
- blog post pull-through rate (number of subsequent views influenced by a post)
- blog subscriptions
- views segmented by time of day
Additionally (the part that really excited Bill the most), I explained that we would be able to measure the actual effect posts have on key website conversions (such as video case study engagement leading to Hire Bill and Contact page views). Bill saw the value in our approach to data-driven blogging and agreed to move his blog over to our platform. Thanks Bill!
What now, brown cow?
So now that we had a source for our case study, we needed to figure out exactly how we were going to pull all of Bill’s existing content over to our platform (articles, comments, categories, links, images – the whole enchilada), and that’s where our lead developer and mad scientist coder
Ryan Wheale’s sweet skills came into play - you know, like num-chuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills.... girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. Check out Ryan in action. You think he got where he is today because he dressed like Peter Pan over here? Here’s a photo of the schema he white boarded to document the mapping between Bill’s original
WordPress blog and NetEffect Services’
Kentico CMS blog platform:
The moment of truth
Bill’s blog has about 650 posts going back to 2006. That’s a lot content to work with, so Ryan got busy and implemented a slick .Net application to grab everything from WordPress and get it successfully pulled into Bill’s new blog on our system. Kudos to Ryan! We pulled the trigger and now have all of Bill’s content in our framework. We’re down to finishing up the final touches of style and functionality, and getting ready to launch this bad boy.
Yesssssss. So that’s a little more about how we’re moving forward with our data-driven blog strategy, and we should have Bill live on our platform, coming soon to a browser near you. Once his blog is up and running, I’ll pick up and share more about the report dashboard I created to know everything about everything related to blogging. Peace out.