Time Spent on Site is an Important Blogging Metric, says Sam of Tech Girl #TGSavvy

I was really fortunate to attend the #TGSavvy workshop on the 30 August 2014. An email from SA Bloggers told me about a free blogging workshop in Johannesburg and of course I jumped on it immediately. Good thing I did that because it was soon filled up, before I could even advertise it to my fellow mom bloggers. So I’m sorry that many of you ladies missed it, but I will attempt to put down some points that stood out for me.

The speaker was Sam Wright, the woman behind the Tech Girl site. She also blogs at That Place in my Head. The impressive thing is that she works a full time job and lines up all her Tech girl posts on a Sunday night.

Being smart with your time: The interesting thing I found (in comparing her to last week’s workshop with Stacey Vee) is that Stacey was not in favour of auto sharing. Of course, if you have a plugin that will auto share your post to various social networks, there are no guarantees as to how that will go. I have peeked once or twice at my posts on Google plus and cringed a bit at the photo that accompanied the post (often the One Step at a Time banner, instead of the picture that went with the post). However, I seriously do not have time to sit on every social network and make sure that it looks pretty. I just don’t. I will make time for Facebook because it is my network of choice and I’m on there anyway, and I also use Twitter here and there, but for the rest, I’m sorry, I’m just not going to do it. Sam uses her plugins to share her posts. She also uses Jetpack (which takes the benefits of wordpress.com without the limitations) to share her posts. She even has a plugin that autoshares her content on twitter at regular intervals called Tweet Me. However, she cautions to select your categories of sharing past content carefully e.g. omit competitions that have elapsed. I think what I liked about Sam’s approach is that she acknowledges how busy we are and if there is an easier way to get ahead, why not use it?

Being Safe. Some of you who have followed me for a long time will remember that I started out with a blog called “Survive and Thrive”. I went through a stage (while I was pregnant with Nicky) where i kept on getting hacked. It was happening once every two weeks at one stage, when Nicky was a  baby. You can read more here, here and why I chose to start afresh here. I liked the way Sam was pretty realistic about how sometimes the hackers do win. However she does recommend plugins Wordfence and BPS Security. WordPress also has Askimet for spam comments which I think we all have. Blogger is great because you have the protection of Google. (The reason Google Analytics is the only true measure of your real stats is because the other ones include the spam bots). Sam also showed us a video of how to fix “The White Screen of Death” which happens sometimes with a bad plugin.

Of course you should really make it a habit to back up your blog. Sam recommends Blog Backupr. There are also WordPress plugins BackUp WordPress (you can choose where your back up goes) and BackWPUp (but this one doesn’t back everything up).

Being honest about your stats. It is no good to present to brands the figures that Blogger or WordPress give you because those include the spammers. The best is to give them a screen grab of your Google Analytics. We’ve been seeing a pattern of how page views are not the be all or the end all, but what I really found interesting about this workshop is that Sam draws attention to the “Average Session Duration”: in other words, how much time do your readers spend on your site? Anything less than twenty seconds shows that your blog has little value because it means that the person is taking one look and leaving. You aren’t interesting them at all. She says even thirty seconds is okay if someone is scanning an article quickly. I’m pleased to say that I’ve just had a look at One Step at a Time and the average there is 1:24. and SA Mom blogs is 2:38.

By the way, some ideas to get people to stay on longer (that I’ve learnt from reading Sits girls posts and books) are using a plugin to link other similar posts and also having category headings at the top for people to explore.

Being true to yourself. Although Sam gives lots of tips to improve your SEO (social sharing, plugins – Seo by Yoast, WP Optimise) the overiding secret is to produce excellent, continuous content. Although you want to write for your reader, you also shouldn’t be a slave to SEO. It is your blog after all, and you need to write authentically first.

 

There was a lot more that Sam shared but I think I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’ll just leave you to drool over the goodie bag, which we were privileged to get from various sponsors.

Mustek sponsored the workshop venue and food. They have a number of brands, including Mecer. They gave us a lovely tool kit, highlighters, pens, notebook, water bottle and discount vouchers for tablets. I was very impressed with their generosity.

From Nedbank a pen and a cute screwdriver thing that looks like a pen but you can change the top part. It also works like a flashlight. I gave it to my husband because he works in IT and always has to open things!

A lovely posh notebook from Samsung. A magazine from Joburg Style. My first collector coin from Scoin Shop. A discount voucher for Paint Nite and Anni King. And a favourite of mine, Macaroon. (You can see my post on Macaroon here).

So thank you Sam, thank you sponsors and in particular Mustek for allowing us to have a great time!