Blogging & what interests readers?

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Some readers know that NextStage is currently evaluating ways our technology and tools can help bloggers understand their audiences better. Here I'll use my own blog as an example. The following charts all cover the same seven day period, April third to tenth this year.

One question I always ask myself is "What's interesting my readers?" As I know which material was published on what day, the "Reader Interest Level by Day" chart (figure 1) is a good indication of which content readers are focusing their attention on each day.

The nature of blogs, though, is that what I publish on a given day might not be what people are reading on a given day. The next question then becomes "What did they read?" I can answer that by correlating the information in figure 1, Reader Interest Level by Day, with the information in figure 2, Reader Interest Level by Page.

I can look on the Reader Interest Level by Page report and learn what pages people were focusing on during that same time period. If the highest level of interest was for a page that was published on a previous day, I have an idea of how long it takes for something I write to propagate through the ether and into readers' awareness.

The next question becomes "Where are all these curious people?" That is answered by the third chart. "Reader Interest Level by Location" (figure 3) indicates which places find my posts the most interesting. Here I learn that I'm a hometown favorite (NH) and also in Phoenix, AZ, followed by Indianapolis and the Netherlands.

By matching all this information I have a much better idea of what content gets the most attention, where and when and by whom (when we do company-level listings). Note that NextStage isn't counting page views, time on site or any other traditional web metrics. We're determining things like intentional awareness, focused cognition, meaningful noise factors, intentional and unintentional attention factors, et cetera.

I find this information useful and appreciate that others might not. Emetrics Summit organizers are using this information tactically and strategically to plan for future Emetrics Summits. Personally, I'm using Level-of-Interest information to help me plan my future blog posts.

Additional resources:

If you'd like a bibliography about the research behind this column, please feel free to email me.

For more on why attention is not the same as time spent, check out Stephane Hamel's excellent Attention Economy blog post.

We've described the mathematics that drives this research in A Simplified Mathematical Model of Evolution Technology Interactions, but -- fair warning -- at $775.00, it's an expensive research paper.

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is also author of the Biz Media Science blog. Read full bio.