A Wordle of opportunity - Is your blog on topic?

A Wordle of opportunity - Is your blog on topic?

As with many things there is often a solution and increasingly that solution is web based and I don't just mean your simple search engine query input and pages upon pages of answers solutions. Clever computer types have created a myriad of tools for web analytics and monitoring. Some tools offer fantastic graphical representations that will illustrate where you have come from and where you ought to be going. Having demonstrated the web application of Tweetdeck in my previous post as a means of monitoring your small business online in the real time stream of consciousness that is Twitter, this post will demonstrate to you just how you can analyse your company blog-where it has come from and where it ought to go. Whatever purpose your blog serves, it is expected that posts will be categorised and then subcategorised by 'Tags.' Not only will tags organise content for you, search engines love nothing more than to feast on tagged content. Tagging makes life easier for you, search engines and your reader. Now here comes the web solution to analysing your blog content. Assuming your blog has an RSS feed-many blogging platforms throw this nugget in for you- copy and paste the feed URL into the appropriate field on Wordle, sit back and watch it make a pretty diagram for you. Wordle, in their own words, ‘…is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.’ Now you could compare your Wordle diagram with your blog’s ‘Tag Cloud,’ should you have one or just take the results at face value. What does it tell you? Does the diagram match up to your perceptions of what you think you blog about and in turn demonstrate you are writing on topic and selecting the most appropriate tags for your wonderful content? Or does it highlight a need to tweak your content? It could be that it encourages you to write more broadly or to focus on one particular topic in order to readdress the balance or to fine tune your niche. You will see that I have produced the Wordle diagram for this here blog, we can see that ‘Marketing,’ ‘Business’ and ‘Online’ feature prominently, as you would hope for a blog which shares the latest thoughts on marketing to small businesses in an ever increasing online world. It could be suggested that the Marketing Donut blog would do well to drive more content along the lines of the key topics which are displayed on the Marketing Donut site itself in order to increase the depth of coverage in the field of Marketing. Give it a go and see if it gives you an illustrated guide to being on topic or not. Where have you come from and where do you want your blog to go?

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