Results2Match

Together with my co-founder Hans Lodder I regularly discuss the level of interest you show in our Results2Match community blogs. Since we are not aiming to be bestseller authors, the absolute number a blog is read is not the measure for our “success” (although it is nice to be read by a lot of peers!). More important is that we do try to listen to our audience as to identify topics that seem worthwhile to address.

When we started to write our blogs, there were two reasons for it:

• We wanted to let out some of our frustration we had over things we noticed or experienced in our industry
• We wanted to give some publicity to our Results2Match network

After almost two years, this mission is still valid. Apart from that, I guess content and audience wise everything changed:

• Our audience
  Initially we hoped our personal networks could be interested. Although we still have some fans in this area, our audience has spread widely literally around the world. Apart from popping up in individual searches, we seem to have collected quite a number of other community sites who are publishing our articles. This ranges from CIO-focused websites to newsletters of colleague industry commentators.
• Our inspiration
  Well, being read is an inspiration as such. When we started, we thought to be out of topics within a very short while. Walking around in our industry and being amazed, surprised, annoyed and whatever other primary emotion we encounter, that walking will probably be a never-ending source of inspiration. What is then left is just finding the weekly motivation and transpiration of any writer.
• Our topics
  Curious about why certain topics are better read than others, we used some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to find out what scored and what not. In general, people seem to look for certain (hyped) words (e.g., CIO, KPI) and practical things like checklists. Industry specific topics, such as some of our guest-blogs, lead to pickup in dedicated communities very quickly.
• Best-used-before
  To our utter surprise our content has a much longer lifetime that expected. Blogs of more than a year ago can suddenly be picked up again quite heavily. New blogs may have a slow read rate initially but show to have diesel-like performance over time.
• The responses
  The quantitative response is the number of daily unique visitors of our site. Initially we were aiming for any number of visitors above zero. With currently on average well over 350 unique visitors per month, we are very proud about the level of response we are getting. Due to the fact that linked articles on other sites only show up as one unique visitor per day, the actual number of hits is even much bigger.

What makes us going is also based on the qualitative response to our publications: the number of comments, emails, downloads and info requests we get.

First of all: public “Comments” to our blog are “out”. Like myself, people rather want to react privately than publicly. And I must admit that the emails we get often lead to a far deeper and open discussion on a topic.

We started only lately to provide additional down-loadable material. This seems a hit: we all like to get useful material for free.

In summary: we are motivated to go on; your comments and reactions will give us the fuel to do it.

Hans.van.nes@results2match.com and Hans Lodder