Placing a value on your readers

The word ‘value’ means different things to different people and you could argue that every one of your readers is priceless, but for the purposes of this article ‘value’ will refer to a monetary amount.

For a blogger placing a value on their readers is difficult but for the purposes of setting targets and goals it can be a very useful exercise. It might not be an exact science and will involve the use of averages but if you can assign an average value to each visitor to your site then you can work out how many views you need to reach your goal.

As an example I’m going to use 2 months worth of stats from my iPhone-experience.com website.

Across August and September iPhone-Experience.com received 9129 unique visitors and through Adsense ads generated 2065 pence (£20.65)

On average each visitor for that 2 month period was worth 0.23p. If I was to set a goal to generate a £60 adsense payment every month then I need to target £2.00 per day. To do this then on average I would need to attract 870 readers to the site everyday.

Now there’s a target.

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Using Social Media to research breaking news – Eman al-Obeidy

The world is a changing place, and thanks to world wide networks information and news can flow freely and rapidly.

The world was in shock when Libyan national Eman al-Obeidy burst into a hotel full of journalists to share her horrible and frightening experiences at the hands of the Gaddafi security forces, only for her to be snatched by Gaddafi loyalists despite the best efforts of the journalists.

 

Using the Internet and Social Media it’s possible to keep right up to date with all the breaking developments.Using Google it was very easy to find the name of the women, Eman al-Obeidy, and then that gives us a starting point for further researchMillions of Twitter users post tweets every second and many of them use it to report and share their news and to provide links to other news sources.

Twitter includes a fantastic search facility and provides the ability to save search strings so that you can quickly re-run your favourite searches.
By typing Eman al-Obeidy into the Twitter search engine quickly generates many results.

Looking at the results we can quickly see the latest breaking news on Eman al-Obeidy, and because the search is saved it can quickly be re-run.

 

It’s possible to use tools like Flipboard to present your twitter searches in various formats, or by using a Mobile Twitter client you can check the latest updates from the saved search when you are away from your computer.

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Turn Your Social Media into a Magazine with Flipboard on the iPad

Unlike traditional Laptops and Desktops computers, the iPad has a size and form factor which makes it ideal for Magazine style content, the touch driven interface is ideal for flicking between articles and pages.

Flipboard is a fantastic application for the iPad which in addition to providing a number of quality news streams, can turn your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds into a virtual Magazine. The end results are fantastic, well presented articles with associated media that is 100% relivent to you as it uses your own Social Media Feeds to produce the articles.

This also opens up another avenue of providing content to your readers. If you readers follow you on RSS then you articles will appear in their Flipboard articles, also if you Tweet the links to your posts then any Flipboard users who follow you on Twitter will also see your articles. This is definitly a facility that you can promote to your readers, most Flipboard users will check their articles regularly, so this is a great way to reach them.

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Charlie Sheen Sacked TV Star to Internet Phenomenon

It’s been an Interesting week in the life of Charlie Sheen, the Movie and TV actor who has recently been most famous for starring in Two and a Half men has formally been sacked by his bosses at Warner Bros following Sheen’s high profile criticism of the shows writer.

Sheen’s behaviour has apparently started to become increasingly erratic and a series of high profile, and somewhat strange TV interviews have generated an incredible amount of Internet Interest, as viewers have been curious as to what his next step will be.

Over the last week Sheen’s Social Relevance as soared.

Recent Video Interviews with Sheen on YouTube are getting millions of views, the number of people who follow him on Twitter has sored to 2.5 million and as this graph shows the google searches related to him has recently rocketed.

Charlie Sheen may have lost his job but with his sudden increase in popularity and demand for TV interviews it will be a while until he’s got time on his hands again.

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Stuart Baggs – Harshly Treated or Done a Favour

Stuart Baggs has achieved  a level of infamy since the current series of the BBC TV show The Apprentice hit our TV screens. At only 21 years old the young entrepreneur he has already proved himself to be successful businessman running the successful Bluewave telecommunications company on the Isle of Man.

Often referring to himself as ‘The Brand Stuart Baggs’ and sometimes showing  a cocky and loud personality, he didn’t always get on with the other contestants on the show, but this made good TV, and despite not being popular with the general public Stuart captured their interest and viewers tuned in.

Reality TV shows need strong characters to be entertaining and Stuart was certainly entertaining as viewers tuned in week after week to see if this would be the week that he was sent home after being fired.

In reality, Stuart was never going to win the show, but he did do very well reaching the penultimate episode of the series, only for a misunderstanding over which telecommunication licenses he holds led to an assumption that he had lied about details on his CV, leading to a scene of pure TV Gold with Lord Sugar dramatically and angrily sacking him with the now infamous term “..full of shit, basically..”

With hindsigh,t Lord Sugar would probably admit that he was a little harsh on Stuart who did show a few glimpses of why he has found success.

But, however, like other reality TV contestants a dramatic exit can lead to a silver lining, and this can be seen using the search analysis tool Google Insights for Search, which can be used to show the trends in keyword searches.

The following 2 graphs show firstly the increasing trend for the search term ‘Stuart Baggs’ in Google, the second graph shows the sudden increase in the number of searches for Stuarts’ company Bluewave.

Stuart may not be a brand himself but he certainly is socially relevant to the media at the moment, and his company is getting an increased level of interest, so perhaps Lord Sugar did him a favour.

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Putting Gillian McKeith into Perspective

In this post I looked at how the search traffic  for Gillian McKeith had increased since her entry and exit from the TV Game Show ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get Me out of Here’, even though during her time on the show she didn’t cover herself in glory.

During the same weekend a contestant on another Reality Game Show, The X-Factor, Wagner who also hadn’t performed brilliantly on the show was sent home.

Both Celebrities had received their own share of negative press, but how did their popularity hold after their exits from their relative shows?

The following graph was produced using Google Insights for Search and tells a story.

You can see that Gillian’s popularity is a long way short of Wagner’s and has already started to tale off, this is strange as she was already a celebrity going onto a show and should already have had a fan base.

During his time on the X-Factor Wagner became an anti-hero, gaining support from those not liking Simon Cowell, whereas Gillian carried a wave of curiosity based how badly she would perform tasks, and no more. After she left the show there was nothing to make her socially relevant anymore.

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Gillian McKeith Leaves the Jungle to Internet Fame

As previously discussed Current Events can have a real impact on the amount of Google Search carried out for a person or topic, as a case in point the recent story of the TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith.

Gillian McKeith was perhaps a minor celebrity, having a couple of TV shows and ongoing Magazine column, she was perhaps more infamous for the credibility of her qualifications rather then her media career, but this may change as Gillian has recently taken part in the UK Version of the TV shown I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

Her appearance on I’m a celebrity has been less then Triumphant, with several trials not going well for her, and as early as the first show the revelation that she had a severe phobia of insects, and heights, and close spaces, and rats, and it became quite clear that perhaps the Australian Jungle might not be the best place for her. In fact the viewers of the program started to wonder why on earth she had signed up for the show, as the environment and constant failure of tasks started to take it’s toll on her, she even apparently fainted on several occasions as the watching public continued to vote for her to do the tasks.

So was this the terrible experience all bad for Gillian McKeith, and are there any clues as to why she choose to enter the jungle.

Google Insights for Search may hold the answer, certainly her career wasn’t sparkling before going into the Jungle, and was probably in need of a boost, have a look at this Graph generated by Insights.

You can clearly see that since entering the Jungle, the Interest in Gillian has sky rocketed, this new found social relevance will no doubt lead to well paid TV interviews, Magazine Articles, Photo Shoots and possibly Book deals.

For Gillian this apparently disastrous appearance on a TV game show, may be the best thing to ever happen to her, just perhaps that was the plan all along.

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The Power of Twitter – The Theo Paphitis Effect

Yesterday I wrote this article on how Theo Paphitis used Twitter to promote his new business Boux Avenue. Theo was good enough to re-tweet the link to his followers and the effect was incredible. Within 5 mins the traffic to my blog had spiked to such an extent that my blog was using more then 10% of the CPU power of the server farm and my account was temporarily suspended. Using Google Analytics it’s possible to see this effect visualised.

The graph below shows the sudden spike in Traffic after Theo’s re-tweet and then the much slower decline during the day after.

What this shows is the power of Twitter, people that have a large number of dedicated followers can really create traffic towards their own sites or the sites that interest them, for example this could really help support businesses generate leads or generate interest in charities.

I’m sure that this will only work if your followers respect your tweets, and pay attention to your entries. So keep your Tweets interesting and informative, and you may be able to create your very own Theo Paphitis Effect, as you grow your following.

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How TV can lead to increased Google Traffic

Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking at Trends in Google Traffic in relation to the Current Series of the X-Factor

The Graph below show the amount of Google Searches for 4 contestants on this years X-Factor, John Adeleye, Paije Richardson, Matt Cardle & Storm Lee.

What the graph shows is that for the contestants still in the competition they had a massive spike in Google Traffic following an appearance on TV. I’ve included Storm Lee as a control as he’s already been eliminated from the contest do didn’t appear on this weeks live shows, and his amount of Google searches didn’t increase as a result of being on TV.

What is interesting is that John Adeleye’s spike  started 24 hours later then the other contestants, so only after he left the contest, even the previous nights appearance on TV hadn’t had much of an impact.

If a Blogger was looking for a very short term niche topic I think John Adeleye would be a good choice, low interest and then a sudden unexpected  spike in interest.

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The X-Factor Week 3 – results & predictions comparison

In this post I describe how I was trying to use iTunes to try and predict who would get eliminated from Week3 of The X-Factor.

This week the iTunes method successfully predicted that John Adeleye & Treyc Cohen would be the bottom 2 artists , and as the millions of live viewers saw they were. The judges went on to send John Adeleye home.

Last week this method also successfully predicted that Storm Lee would be the lowest rated artist – this method might be useful to provide a source for Google Traffic grabbing articles.

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Using iTunes to predict the results of the X-Factor Week 3

Following on from this article last week, I’m again trying to predict who gets eliminated from tonight’s Live X-Factor using the number of ratings that each each artists track receives on iTunes.

The table below shows how many ratings each track gets, the average score of each track and a score based on the number of reviews multiplied by the average score of each track.

This table would indicate that the bottom three will be John Adeleye, Treyc Cohen & Mary Byrne.

In comparrison Google Insights highlighted 1 Direction, Rebecca Ferguson & Paije Richardson as being the most 3 unpopular.

Ladbrokes Bookmakers make Belle Amie, John Adeleye & Wagner the most popular to be the next act eliminated.

So no clear Favourites….although it’s not looking good for John Adeleye

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How Current events can influence Google Searches

Or…How being eliminated from The X-Factor was great publicity for Storm Lee.


Last Sunday night saw the Elimination of Storm Lee from The X-Factor, but if it’s any consolation for him, the Online interest in him went through the roof.

The graph below was created using Google Insights for Search shows on the day of his elimination the number of Google searches for his name increased massively, as a comparison I’ve shown the number of searches performed for Paije Richardson. Both artists were receiving a very similar amount of Google Searches, with Paije just ahead but following Storm’s Elimination his Social relevance and the number of searches for information about him increased dramatically.

This could be used to generate traffic…but I’ll come back to that later ;-)

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Using Google Insights for Search to predict the results of the X-Factor (Week 3)

Following on from this article where I experimented using Google Insights for Search to predict the results of the second week of The X-Factor, here’s this weeks results.

Google Insights for Search can be used to generate reports showing how many searches have taken place for specific keywords, so if you generate a report based on the names of The X-Factor contestants you should get an indication of how much interest there is in each act.

The following chart shows this weeks report.

Cher Lloyd - doing well

The Belle Amie result is a bit of a surprise – they were in the bottom 3 last week

which will have caused a google spike, and it’s important to remember that Google Interest won’t necessarily reflect popularity, but by watching trends you can certainly spot who’s causing interest.

Cher Lloyd, Katie Waissel & Matt Cardle must be in the running to win the competition. It will be interesting to see how iTunes sales reflect google Interest.

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The X-Factor Results are in

In these previous posts I described how Google iTunes might be used to predict the results of The X-Factor, but how did the predictions do.

The Actual results were:

  • Storm Lee received the lowest amount of public votes, and eliminated from the competition.
  • Belle Amie and Diva Fever got the next set of lowest votes, resulting  in Diva Fever being voted off by The X-Factor Judges.

The Google test prediction successfully picked Diva Fever.

The iTunes test prediction sucessfully picked the lowest scoring act Storm Lee

The bookies also predicted Storm Lee.

I’ll re-run the tests next week, to see if the tests become more accurate with less acts.

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Using iTunes to predict the results of the X-Factor

**Updated at 19.55 with updated iTunes figures to use for accuracy**

In this Article I discussed using Google Insights for Search to follow popularity in search trends to assist in predicting who would get eliminated in tonight’s X-Factor Show.

I’ve discovered another way of measuring the popularity of each of the acts using iTunes.

Following the live show on the Saturday night each performance is released onto iTunes for fans to purchase, these releases don’t count towards the charts in order to maintain chart integrity but those who have purchased the tracks are allowed to rate each track that they buy. This process might give a clue into how many sales each track has made, as it might follow that the more comments a track has the more people have bought it.

To test this out at 7.55pm to day (5 mins before the Sunday live show) I took a snapshot of the number of ratings against reach track, the results are shown in the table below.

The table shows the the number of ratings, the average rating and a score (Average Rating multiplied by the number of Ratings) for each artist. The number of comments for each artist would indicate that Storm Lee, Paije Richardson & John Adeleye are the most likely to be eliminated tonight.

In comparison:

Google Insights highlighted John Adeleye, Paije Richardson & Diva Fever to be unpopular in the search engines.

iTunes suggested that Storm Lee, Paije Richardson & John Adeleye are generating the least amount of Interest\Sales

Ladbrokes Bookmakers make Storm Lee, Paije Richardson & Belle Amie the favourites to be eliminated.

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A quick way to Judge on-line Popularity with Google Fight

In this previous article I discussed how Google Insights for Search could be used to follow trends of popularity across the Internet. The tool goes into significant detail but what if you just want to perform a very quick exercise to judge the popularity of 2 keywords. A tool called Google fight can help.

Simply type in your keywords and click on Make a Fight & you will see a small animated stick man fight whilst the software fetches your results. Google Fight interrogates Google to find the number of search results for each keyword and the keyword with the highest number of results wins.

As an example, lets see which of the following dragons is the most popular according to Google Peter Jones, Duncan Bannatyne & Theo Paphitis.

Peter Jones 127000 results (using the key words Peter Jones Dragon)

Theo Paphitis 3820 results (using the keywords Theo Paphitis dragon)

Duncan Bannatyne 3590 results ( using the key words Duncan Bannatyne dragon)

So as you can see Peter Jones wins the Google Fight, which given his technology background and media profile isn’t that unexpected, but a useful tool.

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Is it Possible to Predict the Results of The X-Factor

Love it or hate it The X-Factor has become a part of our culture, drawing millions to watch it each week and controlling the music charts.

Things are Looking good for Treyc Cohen

However there is a common belief that the contest has very little to do with Talent and in the main is nothing more then a Popularity Contest, if that’s the case then would it not be possible to predict the results if you judge how popular each artist is?

Can Google Help? If you can tell how many searches there have been for each act then would that be a good indication of how popular or how socially relivant  an act would be? - It might certainly be an interesting experiment

Google offer a tool called Google Insights for Search which offers a tool to display how many searches there have been for up to 5 specific search terms. You can also download the results in CSV format for further manipulation in Excel.

As a test I used to tool to generate the results for each of the X-Factor Finalists still left in the competition for the last 7 days worth of data and put the results into a bar chart, shown below. N.B. the data presented by Google Insights for Search isn’t band up to date and has an approx 3 day lag, but should still offer an insite into the level of interest for each act.

If these results are to believed then John Adeleye and Paije Richardson should be very concerned, and will need to give an incredible performance during the live show. In fact everyone up to and including Rebecca Ferguson might be in trouble.

**Update** Apologies for missing Matt off the list – I’ll make sure he’s included next week.

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