Tag Archives: digital garden

Analytics Part 2: Taking a Closer Look

This week, we learned all about how to optimize our blogs for every website’s best friend and greatest enemy: Google. So I decided to look closer at Spilling the Royaltea’s analytics to see who is visiting my site. Then, I did the same to my search engine optimization or SEO to try to figure out how to grow my audience and rank higher on Google searches. (For an explanation of the random underlines, read further):

Diving into Analytics

This week, I did a deep dive into Google Analytics for my website, and looked at who’s been looking at Spilling the Royaltea. Here’s what I found in terms of website traffic:

Screenshot of Google Analytics for Spilling the Royaltea (all relevant information is stated in the text of the blog)

Since Spilling the Royaltea’s inception, there have been exactly 100 new users and 745 page views! The number of users has stayed pretty consistent over time, with the occasional peak of 5 users a day. While it’s good to know that I haven’t been losing viewers, it would be nice to see this increase sometime soon. Hopefully, by improving my SEO in the coming weeks, I’ll see an improvement shortly.

Unfortunately, since I just recently enabled the option to view demographics, I am unable to see data on this section of my website analytics. Seeing my audience’s demographics would be extremely useful when ensuring I’m catering my data to the right people. For example, I am currently assuming that my audience consists mostly of young people, so I’m using quite a bit of Gen Z jargon in my content posts. But if mostly older people are looking at my blog, I’d have a little bit of a problem, since they might not understand the nuances of the language I’m using. When this part of Google Analytics updates, I’ll be sure to use it to help decide my content.

Implementing Effective SEO

Hollingsworth really drives home the importance of implementing SEO in businesses (and I guess Spilling the Royaltea could be considered one?) to help increase visitors to websites. For example, it builds trust and credibility. By creating an accessible, effective user experience that can be easily found on Google, people feel more comfortable going to my site for information. I’ll also get a larger audience by building this sense of trust and credibility. It even helps me with my knowledge of the web because I need to stay updated about who’s doing what to improve their SEO.

And in this week’s lecture, we learned exactly how we might go about improving our SEO, so I tried out a few of these tactics this week. Firstly, we learned about implementing effective keywords. These keywords are what searchers enter into Google, so I need to make sure I’m implementing enough of these to improve my ranking on Google searches. So for this process post, with the help of ChatGPT, I entered the prompt: Generate keywords for a blog post related to analytics and SEO, and here’s what it gave me:

Screenshot of keywords for my blog post about analytics and SEO generated by ChatGPT

And while I couldn’t include every single one of these keywords in my posts, I tried my best to organically include as many as I could (or slightly varied versions of them), the first occurrence of which I underlined throughout my post.

We also learned about including strategic headers. Although I thought I was already doing this pretty well, I learned about a few things I could do to further improve. For example, I should be using actionable headers, which I did for this post: I included the verbs “dive,” “implement,” and “create” to add some dimension and interest. I also included keywords in my headers, like “analytics” and “SEO.”

The final thing I want to do is work on the branding of my site. So far, although my website is consistent in its theme, nothing in terms of branding really makes it stand out and become memorable for visitors. I think that part of creating this “memorability” is making a logo. Coming soon…

Creating my Digital Garden?

But what about creating a digital garden just for me? In my previous process post about analytics, I spoke of maintaining my site as a digital garden instead of monetizing it and trying to grow my audience. Because of this, I concluded that I wouldn’t worry too much about gaining readers, just because I wanted to make it a space for just me and my own thoughts.

However, after learning about analytics and SEO this week, I realized that I’m already doing a bunch of the things I need to do to increase my audience like summarizing my article in the subheaders and writing high quality information. And after all, I realized that making a few improvements to potentially invite more people into my blog requires a few simple changes that don’t take away from the intimacy of my blog like I previously feared. So at the end of the day, having a big audience to share my interests with sounds like a pretty great thing to me.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Hollingsworth, S. (2018, April 13). 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs SEO. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-seo-is-important-for-business/248101/#close

Normann, S. (2023, March 21). Data and SEO [PowerPoint slides]. POSIEL. https://posiel.com/lecture-files/

Wong, O. (2023, March 19). Digital footprints, analytics, and monetization. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/digital-footprints-analytics-and-monetization/

Photo:

The Fridge Agency. (n.d.). [SEO] [Stock Illustration]. https://thefridgeagency.com/blog/understanding-power-seo/

Digital Footprints, Analytics, and Monetization

Digital footprints, digital trails, and digital breadcrumbs – the data trails we leave behind us when we use technology are something many of us have been warned about our whole lives.

I Know A Lot About This

Like my previous post on digital literacy, I’ve learned quite a bit about digital footprints, especially as a Communication major. In one of my classes, I even produced a 10-minute documentary on the effects of digital footprints on future employment opportunities. But in that documentary, I emphasized individual actions and the implications of “cancel culture,” and how to mitigate the impacts of digital footprints on young people’s futures.

But on Pod Academy’s podcast, they explain that digital footprints don’t just encompass people’s individual actions and choices made on the internet. A lot of information is spread unintentionally when using any sort of technology with a chip in it. For example, when I use my phone, it’s constantly communicating with cell towers and the internet too. That means that my phone’s always giving apps information about me and my environment.   

And as an avid technology user, this is a little worrisome. I don’t exactly want my phone tracking me and giving all these apps tons of information at all times. But also, I’ve sort of gotten to a point where I don’t care. Like many others expressed on Pod Academy, the creation of our digital trails has been so ubiquitous that people simply don’t worry about it anymore.

Google Analytics

The information collected from our digital trails or footprints is often used to improve outreach and grow audiences. For example, for my own blog, I installed Google Analytics, which allows me to track people’s browsing habits on my website.

As of March 18, 2023, within the past 28 days, I’ve had 35 users visit my site. I can also see information about my most popular pages and top content, and how visitors experience my site such as how long pages take to load (which 9.4s, considered poor… oops). This information should help me build an audience and engage them effectively. However, to be completely honest, although I have been checking my Google Analytics from time to time out of curiosity, I haven’t been using it to help improve my site for my audience.

Screenshot of "traffic" for Google Analytics on Spilling the Royaltea, showing that there have 35 users in the past 28 days.
The “traffic” section in Google Analytics for Spilling the Royaltea

I think that a big reason why I haven’t been doing so is because my site is turning out to be more like a digital garden than a blog. Digital gardens, according to Basu, are spaces that do not focus on growing audiences and having huge viewerships. Instead, they focus on personal growth, which is exactly what Spilling the Royaltea has been about. As my blog has developed, although I do have a target audience in mind, I’m not too worried about growing my audience, getting famous and rich, or any of that kind of stuff.

For now, I’m using my analytics simply as a way to satisfy my curiosity about who’s looking at my blog. I’m really enjoying my blogging process and especially like the lack of pressure to gain huge audiences, so I think that’s what I’ll be doing for the time being.

To Monetize or Not To Monetize?

So, all of this leads to the question of whether I should monetize my site. With the whole concept of digital gardens in mind and the idea of creating a space for me and my thoughts, I don’t foresee monetizing Spilling the Royaltea anytime in the near future.

Based on my own experience with monetized sites, I felt like ads make websites feel distant, incohesive, or even disturbing, since many of the ads from Google Adsense are often inappropriate. I want my blog to be as inviting and welcoming to users as possible and I want it to retain its intimate, personal feel. I don’t want users to believe I’m “using them” by exploiting their information and digital trails to extract money from them. With my own apprehensions about advertising and data collection in mind, I don’t want to create a space where others feel the same kinds of fears.

I also want my blog to reflect me and my thoughts only and with a third party who imposes their ads or has input on what kinds of content I post, it takes away from the intimacy of my blog. For me, the content I post is what matters, and I want users to focus on this too.

So although Spilling the Royaltea is simply a passion project (…or a school project) without any financial gain, I’m very satisfied with how the experience has been so far. It’s the joy of blogging that matters, not how much money I can get from it.

References:

Basu, T. (2020, September 5). Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/

Pod Academy. (2016, May 3). Digital breadcrumbs: The data trail we leave behind us. http://podacademy.org/podcasts/digital-breadcrumbs-our-data-trail/

Wong, O. (2023, March 14). All About Digital Literacy. Spilling the Royaltea. http://spilling-the-royaltea.com/process-posts/all-about-digital-literacy/

Photo:

Lean Plum. (2019). [Monetization] [Stock Illustration]. https://www.leanplum.com/blog/free-app-monetization-methods/