11 – Trends

When it comes to our personal wealth, pension fund and equity investments, we tend to focus on long-term trends.

As the graphic to the left shows, US equity prices have been dropping for a while. By March 2 2009 they hit lowest levels since 1997. Such a trend is, of course, highly undesirable if not a disaster for investors, world markets and you and my pension fund’s investments.

When it comes to one’s social media and blogging strategy, things are very similar. As with your investments, trends deserve your greatest attention.

While daily changes happen frequently, these spikes could be due to traffic (e.g., one of your blog posts is getting many Diggs), difficulties with your RSS feed (e.g., feedburner has been known to drop subscribers for a while and then re-add them) and so forth.

Nonetheless, looking at the above chart, trend lines that show upward are far more desirable than those that go down all else considered being equal. We will explain how this applies to our tool and the chart it produces, just click on the hyperlinks below.

Remember, it is also critical to compare periods such as Q1 2007 with Q1 2008.   Such comparisons can reveal interesting insights. For instance, did your traffic during summer months July and August 2009 drop as much as during 2008 or was it less. If less, than questions will be asked what could explain this nice trend.

In summary, not only stock markets move in trends over time, so do blogs and how their popularity with readers increases or decreases. Being able to read and predict trends is essential for driving value from non-revenue-generating activities such as social media presence and blogging in particular. It’s easier said than done, but at least understanding how the different trends operate is a good start to speculating on the direction of the performance of one’s blog.

Find out more about how to improve rankings for your blog(s) and how this applies to the different indicators we use for ranking here:

FT ComMetrics Blog Index, Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking, Technorati Authority, Yahoo! InLinks, Google Blog Search, and the ComMetrics Footprint.