For many of us as bloggers, the ultimate goal is to build an audience of readers who feel engaged with our brand, who show up on a loyal and regular basis, and who eventually feel so much a part of what we do that they naturally want to share it with their own friends, family and networks.
Last week I sat down and put together a short presentation on how to do just that with your blog and shared it on my Periscope account. It contains a short exercise that for me helps to get into the mind of a reader and to analyse the journey that they might need to take to get fully engaged.
I’ve included the full presentation below for those who would like to watch rather than read but the exercise in brief is….
Grab a pen and paper and draw a line horizontally across the page.
On one side put ‘surfer’ and the other describe what you want them to become. For me it’s about helping them to go from being a ‘surfer’ to being ‘engaged, subscribed and sharing’ (and a customer).
Your page might look like this:
Now that you’ve got the starting and ending positions – what needs to happen to get them from point A to point B?
When I did this exercise I came up with a variety of things that need to happen. I jotted down a few words for each thing:
I need to grab their attention
I need to pique their interest
They need to feel some desire about what I’m doing
They need to feel I’m a credible source
They need to start to feel engaged
They should feel some sense of anticipation that something is coming that gives them a reason to subscribe
They should feel a sense of belonging
Your list might be similar – or it could have other milestones that might get them to your ultimate goal.
Your page probably looks something like this:
With this little roadmap of the journey of one of your readers it’s now time to ask yourself what would move a reader along this process?
There are a number of things that can help but as bloggers I want to suggest that the content we produce is the primary vehicle that drives people along this journey.
Every piece of content you publish whether on your blog, in an email, in social media updates has the potential to move people along this process but different types of content will achieve different things so it can be well worth mixing up the types of content that you produce to help with this.
I go into more detail of the types of content that help at different points in the journey in the video below (it starts at about the 6:35 minute mark if you want to start there).
On my photography blog:
Content that gets attention might include humorous content, infographics, list posts
Content that gets interest and builds desire can include our ‘image collections’ (aspirational content)
Content that builds credibility includes some of our longer form very comprehensive tutorials
Content that builds anticipation includes some of our series of posts that come out over a week or month
Content that builds engagement and gives a sense of belonging might include our weekly challenges
Of course here I’m just talking about blog content but the same goes for your content on social media and if you really want to ramp it up – your email autoresponders can be a brilliant way to move people through this type of sequence of content.
There’s lots more if you have about 25 minutes to watch the presentation below, but if not I hope some of the above also gives you a few ideas of how to get in your readers shoes and create content that moves them intentionally towards engagement rather than just hoping it happens.
Here’s the full recording of the presentation.
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Recently, I gave this blog a bit of a design makeover, and moved to a much more minimal look and feel.
In fairness, my previous theme – Myth, from MeanThemes – had a pretty stripped back look, with a simple hero image for the header area, and single column design for the content.
But, while I was more than happy with the design (it lasted almost a year before my recent makeover, which is a record around here!), I still got a little restless.
Hence the makeover.
As you can see, it’s a really bare and stripped down approach.
No navigation menu (unless you click on the “hamburger menu” at the top right). No featured image. No sidebar. In fact, pretty much nothing except the content, and my introduction on what I hope to achieve here.
Because, at the end of the day, do we really need anything else that distracts attention from what we’re trying to achieve?
I don’t believe so. Not here on the blog, nor in life.
The Focus of Needing to Be Focused
Since starting this blog back in 2008, it’s gone through many iterations, both in the style of presentation, and the theme of the content within.
It’s gone from having about a dozen or so categories, to only having one (which is the bigger picture of this thing called life and where we sit in it, personally and professionally).
It’s gone from having multiple sidebars to zero; from having affiliate ads and posts trying to sell something to zero ads and zero selling (at least, not the hard sell).
And it’s gone from using a socially-driven comment system like Livefyre to a more personal and thoughtful comment solution like Postmatic.
The reason for all of these changes is simple – to meet the goals I have, the focus has to be on the paths to get there.
My goal is to make this blog a destination for folks that prefer “pure blogging”, where a more personal experience is enjoyed, and the content isn’t driven by the desire for social proof and vacuous clicks.
To do that means the content has to be focused. Hence the stripped down look and feel of the blog, where the only thing in front of you are the words.
It’s a little worrying, if I’m honest – because now the content truly does have to stand on its own, as opposed to being supported by a nice flashy sidebar with a colourful sticker or two.
But it’s also a good exercise, as it makes you more aware of the words you’re putting down and the message you want to create.
It’s not too different from life, really, if you think about it.
Pulling Back the Covers on a Life Lived in Shadows
Oftentimes in life, when asked by people what others might thing of us, we reply with something like,
I’m an open book. If you want to know me, just look at me or be around me for an hour or two.
While that’s an admirable – and mostly honest – statement, it’s not quite a true one. Think about it.
When you share something on Facebook, is it a picture/update of how awesome your kids/husband/wife are, or is it “Shouted at the kids, felt like a shitty parent for doing so, and don’t get me started on what my other half did yesterday!”?
When you upload a picture to Instagram, is it the first one you take or is it the fortieth attempt at getting a smile just right, a background just so, a pet just in the right contortion to be cute?
When you leave a comment on a blog, do you really say what you want to say, or is it a sanitized version of what you believe, because you don’t know the make-up of the other commenters?
These are just online examples. Offline, it’s the same.
How we present ourselves to our colleagues. How we approach a social setting. How we act in the privacy of our own homes versus how we behave under the gaze of the public.
While we might think that’s natural defense mechanism, the truth of the matter is it’s anything but natural.
Instead of being the open book we say we are, we’re an edited version of the story we want to tell.
We do this because we tell ourselves this is how people will like us. This is how people will gravitate towards us. This is how people will become our friends.
And they might – for a while. Until the covers are pulled back, and the shadows of your real life are on display for everyone to see.
Some may stick around. Others may not. But the choice is no longer yours to make. Now the story decides which characters are left to take part.
The irony is, if we don’t live in the shadows to begin with, we’ll attract the people we truly deserve. The people who’ll be there when we need them.
The people we can truly call friends.
It’s not easy. You have to be focused, and brave, and ready to throw the covers back, even when it’s cold and dark outside.
But the reward and validation are worth it.
Try it sometime. You might just pleasantly surprise yourself.
When You Strip Everything Away originally appeared on Danny Brown – – all rights reserved.
No designer creates wow work 100% of the time. There’s no question that creating good design takes significant exertion, but generating the wow factor in your work can also be fairly effortless. Many designers follow their intuition during the creative process and incorporate universal symbols and metaphors simply because it “feels right.” Intuition — accessible to all people and most especially useful to those engaged in creative pursuits — guides designers towards solutions that align with a universal knowing.
“There are three responses to a piece of design — yes, no and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.”
– Milton Glaser
Adding a universal quality to a logo provides the broadest communicative reach, what almost all identities are intended to accomplish. The intellectual exercise of connecting the dots of “thinking” is not irrelevant in design, of course — particularly when it comes to branding — but by combining the intuitive immediacy of symbols and metaphors with strategic thinking, you integrate essential information that helps your logo stand out and be remembered.
This three-part series explores fundamental creative strategies for designing effective logos. The first part shows how to use symbols, metaphors and the power of intuition.
Design’s Intuitive Process
“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious.”
– Carl Jung
There will always be those who dismiss the non-quantifiable, but many of history’s most important thinkers have given intuition its due, including Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Jung, Ray Bradbury and Steve Jobs — even Alan Turing, the infamous WWII logician and cryptanalyst, understood mathematical reasoning to be based in “intuition and ingenuity.” Great thinkers and futurists from all walks regard intuition as having a key role in the problem-solving process. Fortunately for the many designers who rely on wisps of inspiration to help materialize creative solutions, intuition is not some foreign object lodged in our process. It’s as natural as breathing. Intuition is the medium many creatives swim in, while intellect provides a formula to execute and deliver on the finished product.
As a medium, intuition is readily accessible to anyone, although it is best honed with use (try the exercise at the end of this article). As an inherent ability, it doesn’t typically get the same validation as an “educated” intellect. Culturally, we are trained to accept that only through the process of formal education (and a lot of it at significant expense) are we able to arrive at viable solutions. While I’m not here to debase a good education or strong intellectual skills (they are fundamental to anything human beings do or create), I do want to make a compelling case for the useful and reliable qualities of intuition in good design. Balancing the two can help you create a logo that appeals to a wider audience. And that’s important in a globally connected world.
Our worldwide, interconnected technology affords any business, large or small, access to a global audience. On the flipside, this access produces an inordinate amount of background noise that has to be constantly managed. Complicating things further, today’s stressed economy demands smaller budgets with smarter thinking. Experience has taught me that the addition of a sensual experience to a logo — the integration of feeling with thinking — provides an immediate and intuitive connection. This sidesteps the need for the brain to do interpretative somersaults. Or to throw a lot of money at the logo to make it stick via redundancy. Small-budget logos that use this method get a relationship-driven response from their audience that any big-budget client would envy. By engaging the subconscious, symbols and metaphors are an optimal way to reach and hold the audience’s attention longer, and that results in better recall later.
Symbolic communication adds an immersive aspect to design. Symbols came long before written language was invented. Symbols and metaphors both expand information into meaning, but each is distinct in how it works. Symbolic communication is succinct, immediate and tightly packed, while metaphoric communication links specific elements within the design to more precisely define who the client is — sometimes unexpectedly (and even delightfully!) so.
The Symbolic Principle In Logo Design
Describing a symbol with words is like trying to capture a star in a jar, but I’ll do my best here. Symbols are whole and complete entities, while words are made up of fragmentary letterforms. Symbols are processed intuitively and immediately, while a word must be understood first in its particular language, and then be related to a visual (and words expanded into sentences must also be strung together in sequence for meaning). We process the two concepts very differently.
Symbols are immediate, while words must be associated with an image to be understood.
Symbols are immediate, while words must be associated with an image to be understood. The yin yang symbol is instantly understood as two opposites contained within a whole, but words require the additional step of visualizing the symbol before it becomes meaningful.
Symbols reference patterns and imagery common to all human beings. You could describe a symbol as a seed or egg that expands into meaning with the viewer’s participation — in the same way that seeds and eggs expand into new organisms once fertilized by an outside source. Although a tree looks quite different than the seed from which it originally grew, it has the seed’s “container” shape at its core. Human beings have a bellybutton at our center — our essential birthmark — linking us to the circular egg from which we developed.
Circles and spheres tend to manifest as original source: Molecules, cells, eggs, seeds and planets all carry this archaic shape (more on this and other geometric shapes upcoming in part 3, “How Geometry Influences Logo Design”). Symbols are the archetypes of human communication. The etymology of the word “archetype” is arche-, original, and type, kind, coined by Swiss psychoanalyst and symbolism master, Carl Jung. As original kinds, archetypes — in their pristine state — are limited in number but universal in function and meaning. Archetypal symbols are the foundation of the human systems we invent and the structures we build.
“The soul never thinks without an image.”
– Aristotle
Abstract archetypal symbols — such as the shape of a circle — contain knowledge that resides in the collective unconscious (another Jungian term) of all humans. Snakes and apples are examples of more complex symbols that are layered with cultural meaning. The basis of the symbol is existential (for example, a spiral rather than a coiled snake) but it becomes significantly more complex with the addition of cultural context. Because different cultures have varying distinctions, it is important to research the interpretation of your chosen symbol to ensure it supports the meaning you want to convey within the culture(s) in which it will be used.
3 Examples of symbolic integration in human systems and structures, from left to right: the yin yang symbol, the stable base of the pyramid, and Lady Liberty. (Images: Rickard Blomkvist4, SueC5 and Xavier Marchant6) (View large version7)
Examples of symbolic integration in human systems and structures are the yin yang symbol where opposites completing the whole, the stable base of the pyramid that points to the unknowable and infinite universe, and the sacred number seven incorporated into Lady Liberty’s feminine principles of abundance and inclusion. The seven-sided heptagon is the only polygon of the first ten geometric shapes that cannot be precisely created via regular geometry tools, setting it apart.
Symbolic Versus Letterform Logos
Symbols are perceived sensuously and unconsciously (and, therefore, immediately) while words are actively thought about before the subject makes the connection to an image of a thing or idea. Symbols remove the thinking step by being directly perceived, one of the reasons why symbolic logos are more effective than wordmarks. Symbols also communicate universally, while wordmarks are constrained by the limits of language. However, words and symbols can be effectively used together to expand meaning and impact.
Eclipse logo. (Design: Jeff Kimble) Health Plus logo. (Design: Maggie Macnab)
Symbol Use in a Logo Design
Symbolism was the primary communication tool for a logo I designed in the mid-’80s for an Arabian horse farm. In the first exploratory sketch, I focused on the relationship between mare and stallion, the intimacy of which was implied by touching faces. The second sketch shows this concept progressed into the relationship between mare and foal, with the foal protected under the mare’s shoulder.
8 The original sketches for Maddoux-Wey Arabian Horse Farm show the process for the final design. (Design: Maggie Macnab) (View large version9)
The original sketches for Maddoux-Wey Arabian Horse Farm show the process for the final design. Symbolism condenses and simplifies a logo’s communication and provides universal relevance. The visual simplicity of a symbol also supports the flexibility that a logo needs in order to work in multiple future applications.
I scrapped my first attempt as unworkable, but had I not gone through that first step, I don’t know that I would have recognized the opportunity to rotate the design 180° in the second sketch. (Future opportunities are an important reason to preserve and refer back to your process.)
Because of the Arabian’s delicate bone structure, I was able to create a perfect fit between face and shoulder. This relationship was further emphasized when I enclosed the design in a circle, creating a symbolic yin yang effect (which references my first sketch of the opposites contained within the whole in the mare and stallion relationship).
The simplicity of this logo categorizes it more closely as a symbol, or a universally recognized image that expands into a personal relationship with the viewer. Another benefit of the symbolic logo is its inherent timelessness, remaining relatively unaffected as styles change. The simplicity of a symbolic design has clearly defined negative and positive space, making for broad flexibility, which is essential for many future applications. Symbols are optimal choices for long-term branding, and they help a logo retain its relevance (and, therefore, value) over the long haul.
The Arabian logo in the real world. (Image: Adam Bennett)
The Arabian logo has been printed, foil and blind embossed, used as jewelry design, applied to signage and, most recently, engraved on a granite memorial to commemorate the life of Claire Davis, an equestrian teen killed in a tragic high-school shooting in 2013.
Using Metaphors In Logo Design
Metaphoric logos expand information just like symbolic ones do, but they go one step further by making connections between distinct concepts. This helps to further distinguish specifics about the client and adds interest to the design by creating relationships that are unexpected or unusual. They are memorable because they contain the aha! component.
One example is the Elefont logo, every possible opportunity was taken to create a simple but powerful logo that grabs your attention on multiple levels: symbolic, metaphoric and semantic.
Valle Encantado is a farming and traditional craft-making partnership in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There were several opportunities to create metaphoric links between the client’s name and purpose in their logo. The primary one was to use the “V” letterform as a reinforcement of the name and with a reference to farming in the character’s negative space. Activating both filled and empty space (a principle of the “closure gestalt”) maximized the logo’s communication.
The “V” also represents the Roman numeral five, one of those happy accidents you want to look for to leverage a logo’s communication. This helps connect the design to the hands-on work of farming and community endeavors. In branding the organization, the logo was further reinforced with the slogan “Cultivating Community” to tie it together. (The spiral and helix also played an important role in this logo’s communication, and a discussion of how they were used is coming up in part 2, “Using Nature’s Patterns in Logo Design”).
Metaphoric logos can be tricky to create, but if you really delve into your client’s purpose and name and the potential ways in which they can be visually related and expanded upon, multiple aspects can be resolved into one coherent, tightly packed concept. I’ve used this method to create distinct and recognizable logos for over 30 years because it works for my clients and works for me: Logos designed decades ago continue to bring new clients (and many have been plagiarized and settled out of court — protecting your original work is also important). Logos that communicate simply and deeply benefit everyone: the client, the audience and the designer who created them.
Some Final Thoughts on Creating a Good Logo
Use symbols and/or metaphors as the core communication of your logo
Symbols and metaphors help establish a relationship between the client and logo, and logo and audience. If you design a wordmark, augment its communication with a relevant visual component. Secondary design considerations — color combinations, stylistic textures or typographical applications — might need updating over time, but if the logo is symbolic at its essence, secondary revisions can be made to the logo without negatively affecting the brand. Symbols help the brand hold up as styles and trends change.
Archive and refer back to your conceptual process
I have often referred back to sketches later in the design process and discovered something I hadn’t seen previously. Sometimes different thought tracks can be merged to create a more sophisticated or complete concept. Concepts you scrapped for one client might work for a future client. Respect your creative process and save it for later review. Train yourself to be a conduit between the past and future to maximize your creativity.
Design in black and white
On the practical side, if your logo works in black and white, it will work in any future medium or application — from full color to blind emboss. From a symbolic perspective, the more simply you define the meaningfulness of your logo between the negative and positive space, the more distinct and defined the symbolism of your concept will tend to be. Whenever possible, optimize the communication of your logo by utilizing the empty space as well as the filled (the closure or completion gestalt, which leads the eye without completed lines or forms).
Make sure the logo scales
Create your logo as a vector so that it has the flexibility to scale without issue. Because logos are the core component of an identity system, they have to be ready for any extreme. Logos need to scale from minuscule sizes on a website all the way up to a gigantic billboard and still retain legibility. If it doesn’t hold up at small sizes, remove superfluous information. If anything is lost, make sure it isn’t critical to the communication of the design. If it looks bulky or awkward at large sizes, review how you might alter the drawing of the logo for better flow and form.
Balance the logo
Look at your logo upside down, reflected and rotated. Optimally, it should appear balanced in any configuration. This process reveals imperfections that aren’t noticeable when the logo is right-reading, and it might help you discover ways to extend the logo into branding applications, such as a repeating background pattern.
Detect subtlety
Your job as a designer is to find solutions no one else can. Develop your instincts for subtle communication on all levels: visual, symbolic, metaphoric, word play and intuition. The following exercise will help with that.
Exercise: Intuition and Synchronistic Design
Problems aren’t negative occurrences. They’re opportunities to flex your creativity and problem-solving skills and to connect with the deepest parts of yourself. This exercise will bring more awareness to how you source information through and beyond yourself to come up with a solution that has the most possibility. The most important part of this exercise is to pay attention to how the inside relates to the outside.
Evaluz Luna’s quandary of connecting head with heart in design. (Illustration: Evaluz Luna, Santa Fe University of Art and Design)
This drawing by student Evaluz Luna shows her quandary of connecting head with heart in design. The top of the head and ribcage were cut out by hand and the ribbon threaded through, creating a dimensional work that further enhances her intention of connecting the subconscious aspect of creativity to real-world design practice.
Think of a design problem you’re working on or a personal issue.
Sketch an image that helps to represent the problem for you. (This is not about drawing skill!) Whether your sketch is abstract or realistic, it should have a relationship with the problem that is meaningful to you.
Tell yourself that you want help in finding a resolution or relationship with this issue or project and that you are open to any ideas that might lead to a viable solution.
Over the next few days, be conscious of what is around you, what comes up in dreams or what happens in other situations when you are not actively thinking about the issue (in the shower, for example). External manifestations will arise spontaneously if you take care to notice them. In particular, pay attention to anything that comes up more than once, even if it doesn’t seem to be related to the problem at hand.
If a common image, number or other instance of a tangible “thing” recurs in separate and unrelated events, delve into what the relationship is between it and your issue. Consider your emotions as you explore (they give clues, too). Are you anxious? Comforted? What is the relationship between the problem, you and the recurring event or object? Is the relationship related to a past experience?
Understand that sometimes an unrelated issue blocks resolution to the current problem. It is particularly important that you respect whatever your subconscious reveals and try to interpret the relationship to the current problem as honestly as you can.
Conclusion
Logo design is a challenging yet satisfying balancing act. Good logos are smart but not condescending. They’re accessible and simple but have enough depth to be interesting. They’re immediate and intuitive but memorable when out of sight. And they’re both timely and timeless.
Designing a good logo is the utmost in creative problem-solving. The process makes you really think succinctly about how relationships work. The practice of logo design develops your skills of intuition to recognize obscure but effective solutions and teaches you to discover connections that aren’t apparent on the surface. These are basic tenets for any problem-solving endeavor — not just logo design — and these methods can be extended into personal issues as well. As nature artist Andy Goldsworthy says, “Everything has the energy of its making inside it.” As I tell my students, learn to design a good logo and you’ll learn to design a good life.
Coming up next: “Part 2: Using Nature’s Patterns in Logo Design.” Our life experience is fundamentally based in nature. We often forget this as we develop and grow through our pervasive human-made systems, but nature is the ubiquitous experience of us all. Because human beings are natural life forms at our essence — not machines and not technology — nature is an inherent part of our creative process. By leveraging the forms and processes of natural patterns in logo design, you enhance the communication of your logo by enhancing its connection to our inherent source.
Effective Logo Design, Part 1: Symbols, Metaphors And The Power Of Intuition http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/06/05/effective-logo-design-symbols-metaphors-intuition/ http://rss1.smashingmagazine.com/feed/ Smashing Magazine For Professional Web Designers and Developers
Today I spent a couple of hours doing my monthly deep dive into Google Analytics.
While hardly a day goes by that I don’t check my blogs stats (usually just to see traffic levels and sources of traffic etc) – I try to set aside a longer period of time at the start of each month to do a little more in depth analysis.
I find that these deep dives are always insightful – and often shape the coming month’s blogging.
So here’s a little exercise for you to do today. It will require you to have an analytics program (I recommend Google Analytics) – if you don’t yet have one, installing one is your exercise for the day.
OK – the exercise for today is to look back over the last month of your stats and to do some analysis of what posts were most popular on your blog with the objective of learning something to inform your next month’s publishing.
There’s any number of things you can do in this analysis including looking at:
what was the post about – is there a way to do a followup post?
was there something about the content that made it attractive to readers? A provocative title, a
great image, the voice/style of the post?
where did the traffic come from? Is there opportunity to build relationships with other sites to see this happen again?
did traffic come from a social media site? What made the post shareable? Can you replicate this in future posts?
what comments were left on the post? Were their questions you could followup on in a new post?
I did this same exercise earlier today with content on Digital Photography School. Here’s just a taste of some of the observations I made on my top 5 most visited posts on the site last month:
This was an older post I updated and reposted on the site. The lesson: sometimes posts from years ago can be given a new lease of life.
I suspect the title on this post had a ‘curiosity factor’ that intrigued people into clicking to see if they made the mistakes being talked about in the post.
The post had a strong call to comment with directions on the type of comments I was looking for. The result – loads of comments.
The post was not advanced – it was 3 simple ideas/tips that many people could relate to. Sometimes the simple posts do best.
Traffic came from a spread of sources but it did particularly well on Facebook with little more than a link on our Facebook page. We also saw 2000 visits from a photography forum that I’d not heard of before that I’ll go exploring in.
There were 30+ comments with questions asked – I’ve made a list of these to consider for future articles
This one was a bit of a surprise for me when I saw it ranking as the #2 most visited post in the last month because ‘Focus Stacking’ is a topic that is a little more nichey/specialised than many of the posts we cover.
My suspicion is that the title probably saved the day on this one as it states a clear benefit of reading the post in ‘getting landscapes sharp’. Benefits in titles often work well!
When I looked at the stats on this one I noticed unusually it had two quite distinct spikes in traffic coming into it. Digging deeper it seems that the first spike was due to our newsletter being sent and the second spike – almost a week later was when it saw a rush of traffic from StumbleUpon.
A few of the comments on the post ask for tips on the same technique in other types of post production software – these could make good followup posts.
People reading this post stayed on the site about 40% longer than the average visitor to the site – it seemed to get people reading through the post at a deeper level.
I had a feeling when we published this post that it would do well. The reason being… whenever I write about the mistakes I make it seems to draw readers into the blog.
This post did pretty well on Facebook – I’m not exactly sure why but I suspect it was shared by someone with a good following as facebook sent quite a bit higher numbers of traffic than a typical post.
The idea of ‘mistakes’ posts has given me ideas for a series like this but with some of our other regular writers.
This post succeeded for a number of reasons. Firstly – Travel Photography is a hot topic for us on the site. We try to slip in a travel related post every couple of weeks.
The title was another reason for this post doing well – it signals a ’20 tips’ post which sounds comprehensive and it makes a claim of everyone needing to know what it contains – which always makes people come to see if they know all 20 (you need to be able to back up the claim though with solid content).
This post also had some strong imagery in it which always enhances the post and helps make it more shareable.
Traffic sources were pretty typical on this one (Newsletter and Facebook were most) although it also did quite well with Google+ (I managed to track down who shared it and have followed up with that person to thank them) and also because another travel related blog linked to it. I contacted that blogger to see if they might be interested in us writing a guest post for them – it could be a good relationship to have for both sites.
These ‘image collections’ always do quite well on dPS so I’m not surprised to see it in the top 5. Our readers love inspirational photos.
Having said that I am a little surprised it didn’t do even better – we often see quite good traffic on these types of posts from Pinterest and traffic from that site was next to nothing. I guess freckles don’t hit the spot over there!
Again – this post saw some nice traffic from another blog that I’ve not heard of before – this is an opportunity to get to know that blogger and explore how we can work together in the future.
Interestingly the ‘time on site’ for those viewing this post was about half an average viewer. Obviously people just scan the post and then move on so while they can be good for traffic they don’t stick around as long as a text heavy post.
That’s just one of the areas that I dig into when I deep dive into Google Analytics. I’d love to hear what you do when you look at your stats and to hear what you’ve found today by doing a similar content related deep dive.
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