Marketing Technology Blog

I recently wrote about PostRank and some of the cool features of the system for organizing content for easy reading. PostRank is now launching its own analytics application.

PostRank Analytics provides a bit of a different approach to analytics. Outside of simple visits or pageviews, PostRank enlists an engagement score that utilizes comments and social media mentions to provide you with a proprietary score that indicates the impact your content.

Here’s an overview that synchronizes blog posts and pageviews:

Here’s a daily engagement report you can have emailed to you that provides a quick snapshot of engagement.

I’m not sold yet on the value of the package and whether or not I’ll pay for it. Engagement is an interesting metric… I’m not a fan of calling a comment or a retweet engagement. It’s more of a reaction score than engagement score in my opinion.

Am I missing anything here? Let me know!

The folks at PostRank appear to be putting together some complex tools that solve big problems – so I am happy to see this addition to their service and look forward to seeing what will follow! If you check out the service, be sure to follow Douglas Karr and add our feed under the tag marketing.

With over 400 feeds that I try to follow, I spend a lot of time NOT reading posts on others’ feeds as I filter through to find the great content. PostRank is an application that breaks through the clutter and helps you follow as many blogs as you’d like – but filter the content down to the posts that are most popular. It’s a pretty impressive system, albeit a little difficult to setup and maneuver.

Per the PostRank site:

PostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience’s interaction with online content. An item’s PostRank score represents how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction engagement_metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

PostRank does this by monitoring a number of systems to see which links have generated some interest. To get started, first export your OPML file from your RSS Reader. If you’re utilizing Google Reader, this is pretty simple.

Here’s a short video on how to export your OPML from Google Reader:

PostRank then allows you to utilize their system to fine-tune the subjects that you wish to follow. There are a lot of other tools – including the new widget you see in the sidebar that provides the top posts on The Marketing Technology Blog.

You can also simply follow people on PostRank, like me, to read what I’m reading and see what I believe is important.

To make PostRank more effective and promote your blog, sign up and add your OPML file or the feeds you follow. Let me know when you join PostRank and comment with your user profile page. I’ll be sure to follow you as well!

If you don’t use an RSS Reader, you can add feeds to your favorite blogs manually as well:

1. Click Subscriptions from the menu.
2. Select the Import tab.
3. Select Direct Input from the dropdown instead of OPML.
4. Type in your RSS feed address, in my case http://marketingtechblog.com/rss.
5. Important: tag the feed with specific keywords. In my case – marketing, technology, social media, wordpress, twitter.
6. Click Import.

There’s much more to PostRank than I could write about in a single post. The bottom line is that you can promote your blog effectively with PostRank as well as follow other popular blogs and posts more efficiently. At minimum, be sure to sign up and add The Marketing Technology Blog and tag it marketing.

Some of the feedback I’ve received from readers is that I’ve not been providing a lot of feedback about blogging on The Marketing Technology Blog. So – today I thought I’d take a different approach and look at the technology around your blogging program to provide readers with a checklist of features to review and ensure their blog has.

1. Robots.txt – If you go to the root (base address) of your domain, add robots.txt to the address. Example: http://marketingtechblog.com/robots.txt – is there a file there? A robots.txt file is a basic permissions file that tells a search engine bot/spider/crawler what directories to ignore and what directories to crawl. In addition, you can add a link to your sitemap in it! Don’t have one? Open notepad or textpad and do it yourself… just follow the instructions on Robotstxt.org
2. Sitemap.xml – A dynamically generated sitemap is a key component that provides search engines with a map of where your content is, how important it is, and when it was last changed. By far the nicest sitemap generator I’ve ever used is Arne Brachhold’s XML Sitemap Generator. It also submits the sitemap to Live/Bing, Yahoo!, Google and Ask! (when Ask’s submission service is working).
3. Social Media Flair – I have a comprehensive list of sites where you can find me participating in social media. Remember – your blog isn’t always someone’s destination! Sometimes networking in social media sites and befriending those with common interests can help promote your blog to a relevant audience… off your blog. In the top right sidebar, you’ll find a number of sites where you can find me! Be sure to add me as a friend, I’ll return the favor.
4. Mobile Compatibility – Mobile Internet usage is growing! Is your blog readable on a mobile screen? For WordPress, there’s an ideal WordPress Mobile Plugin that makes the site optimized for mobile and even iPhone Safari usage.
5. Description – If I landed on one of your single pages of your blog, would I know what it was about? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell simply by reading a post. Having a nice description in your sidebar of what kind of content you provide can be essential to getting readers to subscribe or return.
6. Contact Form – I’m amazed at the number of blogs that have no means outside of a comment field to contact the blogger! Do you have a navigation link that points to a Contact Form? Contact forms are less intrusive than a phone number and don’t put you at risk like leaving an email address up.
7. About Page – Who are you and why should I trust you? Even if it feels funny to write a page that speaks to your achievements… it’s not for you, it’s for the visitors. Give them some direction on why they should be listening to you.
8. An Icon – With the advent of tabbed browsers, it’s a lot easier to distinguish your blog by adding an icon. If you don’t know how, simply use a Favicon generator to make the ico (icon) file and upload it to the root directory of your website. Other image files can be used as well, or images or icons hosted elsewhere – just update the shortcut icon link in your header.
9. Disclaimer – Yes, you can get sued for what you publish on your blog. Protect yourself and your property by ensuring you have a great disclaimer!
10. Social Media Integration – Post via Twitter with Hootsuite, other social mediums with Ping.fm, Email Subscriptions (Yes, email is a social media and my email subscriptions are powered by MailChimp), Facebook blog integration… syndication is a powerful tool, utilize syndication to it’s maximum capability!

Friend and fellow Southside Smoosier Jason Bean has a great article on creating URL shortcuts on your site using GoDaddy. For example, if you wanted http://marketingtechblog.com/twitter to forward to http://www.twitter.com/douglaskarr.

If you don’t host on GoDaddy but host on Apache, you can do this by adding some redirects to your .htaccess file. Here’s how:

Redirect 301 /twitter http://www.twitter.com/douglaskarr
Redirect 301 /linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/douglaskarr
Redirect 301 /facebook http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=734666071
Redirect 301 /youtube http://www.youtube.com/user/douglaskarr
Redirect 301 /rss http://feedproxy.google.com/DouglasKarr
Redirect 301 /subscribe http://marketingtechblog.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3564d7b6145ced41a5a27dbd1&id=41191bff78
Redirect 301 /mobile http://marketingtech.mofuse.mobi/

Tonight I added:

• Twitter: http://marketingtechblog.com/twitter
• LinkedIn: http://marketingtechblog.com/linkedin
• Facebook: http://marketingtechblog.com/facebook
• Feedburner: http://marketingtechblog.com/rss
• Subscribe: http://marketingtechblog.com/subscribe
• Mobile: http://marketingtechblog.com/mobile