Whenever I discover something totally obvious that I’m embarassed I didn’t see it before - I think I’ll share it with you under this heading (Sharing the Wealth) so that you don’t ever have to feel my shame.

If you use blogger, make your life a little easier…

In Settings > Formatting, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the form and before clicking on ‘Save Settings’ take a look at the field called “Post Template” immediately above the button. I had completely ignored this field because I thought it was an alternate way to put in a blog template (DOH!) actually, it lets you ‘template’ the actually posts. In other words, if your tired of always changing the font or you have elements that you always include in a post and are tired of copying them out of existing posts to put in the new one - this is for you (see how deep my shame goes?).

Remember: Settings>>Formatting>>Post Template

I’m using it for two simple things - changing the font and including my Raw Sugar/Technorati tags so that I don’t forget to put them in.

Some times, it’s just a good idea to re-iterate information that’s already out there.

Perhaps a half dozen times in the last year, I got fed up with the default color palette in Excel and then have to go hunting for the way to change it, because in a non Excel 2007 instance (thanks Microsoft for bubbling up the color palette in 2007), it’s difficult to get to and more importantly, difficult to remember.

So, if you want to use the colors of your company or web site theme in a report and they’re not in the default palette here’s what you do (at least in Excel 2003):
Tools - Options - Color - Modify.

Now, the palette is limited to only using something like 56 colors at a time so one of the things that you can do is set up your custom pallete and save it as a template and then when you want those colors, you can start a spreadsheet based on the template.

Caveat, selecting a palette that works is difficult (notice how bad the default color choices in Excel are) so if you’re not sure grab the nearest designer or artist and have them help you build a color scheme.

Ok,
so the first try was a complete bust (ugh). But I think I have 95% working solution now that’s been up since Monday night. I had to go after a completely different solution for the 3 column problem but I found it here, thanks to Paul O’brien in the UK.

Other than Avinash’s comment about this being a standard blogger design (modified to the 3 column format) - I think I’ve got most of the issues worked out. At least, the traffic hasn’t dropped to zero and I haven’t received a ton of hate-mail.

If anyone has any idea about why the most recently published post on the home page is freaking out and listing multiple copies of ghost links that aren’t actually there, I’d appreciate some help. If you check the post links on the individual post page, they look fine.

Pushing on, let’s take a look at where the page views in Part 1 came from.

FYI, this data comes from Google Analytics which I’ve had up and running since April 20 so it’s missing roughly six weeks of data but I didn’t feel like buying the premium service from StatCounter.

It boils down to this: “Eric T. Peterson is GREAT for business!” Since historical referral data has been available, Eric is responsible for 28.9% of all referrals.

Notice too, that even though Avinash has only been blogging for about a month at this point, he is already in what I’d call the mid-tier of Referrers.

Organic searches from Google also do quite well at 8.2% but we’ll explore the Google segment at a later time.

Interestingly, two of the folks that I identified as my key ‘Sneezers’ in the last post show up in the small tier - maybe I just like Jeremiah and Robbin so much that I wanted them to be my key sources.

Finally, we can see that directly referred visits are the number one category (just barely beating Eric) at 29.8%.

Oh! And I was surprised at the volume of incidental traffic received from Blogger; which since I am blocking self-generated traffic, must be coming from the ‘Next Blog’ link in the Blogger chrome. I guess I’ll need to segment that blogger traffic and see if there is any value in it.

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So, how do my chosen sneezers do on a trended basis? Let’s take a look.
A couple of things to note about this chart:
1. Web Analytics Demystified and Directly referred visits are on the left (primary) axis and everything else is on the right (secondary) axis2. As discussed here, I’ve been playing with Excel 2007 and these charts were created in it. Unfortunately, Excel 2007 is still a bit buggy and it kept dropping the x-axis data points so the date range is April 20 - June 14.Okay, with the caveats out of the way, what’s going on here?I’ve got nice smooth growth both from Eric and Direct but my other picks have this odd stair-stepping quality to them.My hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, there is a great commonality between Eric’s audience and those who find this blog useful so I get a relatively steady stream of referrals from his site.The stepwise growth from my other ‘Sneezers’ most probably is a function of when they post something that directly refers to Instant Cognition.The latter is pretty simple to prove - I just need to go look at when folks like Avinash referred here in a post and see how it correalates to the steps in the chart.

For the former, I’m not sure how I’d go about testing it - any thoughts?

One thing that I find particularly gratifying about the chart is the nice smooth growth in direct referrals — I’ll have to do a segmentation study to be sure, but — this seems to indicate growth in brand loyalty (boy I hope that’s true) as my visitors are just hitting a bookmark or typing in ‘instantcognition.blogspot.com’ into the address bar.

I thought I would start off this analysis by comparing my blog traffic to Xavier Casanova’s theory of Readership Growth:

The basic cycle goes like this:
(1) Seeding. You start a blog, write 8 or 10 interesting posts, and advertise your blog as much as possible (link on your email signature/forums/etc). Soon enough, another blogger will write about you or point to you (blogroll, etc).

(2) Exponential growth. After reaching some critical mass of readers, readership growth accelerates all of the sudden - typically because a popular
blogger has written about you, or there is a press article pointing to your site.

(3) Organic growth. Your base keeps growing but it’s slooooowww. You’re incapable to sustaining the growth rates you had in phase 2.

So let me caviat this by saying that I am looking at page views and not readers - I don’t have a sufficient sample of readers via Feedburner or Bloglines to make the direct comparison but I think that page views are an acceptable stand-in in this case.

At right, is a chart of page views to this blog during its first one hundred days. You’ll notice that it has both daily tallies as well as a cumulative line. I’ve also included what I think are key events. In most cases, these are when “Sneezers” pick me up and spread the word. Although please note that Microsoft’s acquisition of Deep Metrix caused a spike in traffic to this blog (as it did to most blogs in the web analytics community) around May 6. In addition to the actual stats (daily and cumulative) I’ve added a best fit curve (4th order polynomial) which besides having a great correalation to the actual data, resembles Xavier’s theoretical chart above quite closely.

So, following Xavier’s theory, it looks as though Instant Cognition was in the ‘Seeding’ phase from March 7, 2006 through about April 18, 2006. On or about April 19, this blog entered it’s first ‘Exponential’ growth phase (a low exponent to be sure) that was kicked off by my attendance (and possibly my presentation) at Emetrics. Then, soon after Jeremiah Owyang (a blogging and podcasting heavy) added me to his blog roll and Avinash Kaushik started blogging my exponential growth phase comes to an end and I am now in the ‘Organic Growth’ phase until I get picked up by a new community.

For those who are interested, here are the linear slopes for each phase:

Phase I: 16.21
Phase II: 34.67 (more than double Phase I)
Phase III: 22.43

A couple of things that stand out to me here.

• If you walk along the cumulative line, you see what I consider to be micro traffic cycles. Consider for instance, April 19 through April 22 (Emetrics), in fine, this spike event looks just like the theoretical pattern posited by Xavier. The micro cycle repeats itself between May 15 through May 19 and again from May 28 - June 6 — and these are just a few examples.
• Secondly, observation of the daily page views bar chart bears out the growth trend just by eyeballing the density of high-traffic days during each phase. In phase I there is a paucity of high volume days while in Phase II there are many more and then the high volume days settle back in phase III, they are not as few as in Phase I and the low volume days are at a higher average than before so it looks like Phase II had a positive impact on phase III (otherwise the last phase would look a lot more like the first one).

So, what have I learned from this first part of the analysis?

• Well, if Xavier is right, I’ve got a fairly typical blog and am at least doing some things right. We’ll get into more detail later, but for the most part, I’ve picked up the ‘right’ Sneezers: Eric Peterson, Robbin Steif, Avinash Kaushik and Jeremiah Owyang to name a few.
• Also, it’s hard to get out of your own way. At work I’m dealing with numbers that are many orders of magnitude larger. Climbing down off that mountain to look at my blog traffic is tough.
• Oh! And Xavier’s a really bright guy. Ok, I already knew that (and so did all of you probably) but he is being especially kind by letting me reproduce his charts and theory here and by offering up any other data or help I might need as I go down this 100 days path.

Sources:

• StatCounter
• Coffee, Sun & Technology

Special thanks to Xavier Casanova of Perenety for letting me use his Blog Theory and charts for this comparison.