Photo by mxruben

The last time that I seriously tried sharing my blog posts by Twitter, it seemed like I was sending my posts out into an unforgiving blackhole. I used BufferApp, which contains analytics for tracking how many people click on your link, but it was discouraging… to say the least. I’d see a click… but then what? Did they immediately regret clicking? Did they look at other posts? I would check my Google Analytics, but the click wouldn’t be there!

Only a portion of Twitter traffic happens on the web. Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms have so many new ways to access them — whether from a desktop program like Tweetdeck or a mobile app.

Google Analytics (and most every analytics program currently existing) can’t figure out where that link is coming from. For all that it can tell, that visitor typed in that URL by memory. It looks like Direct Traffic, so it reports it as that.

Adding an extra campaign tracking parameters to the URLs that you tweet will fix that. The parameters tells Google Analytics explicitly that the visitor came from Twitter, or whatever you set. Once I implemented this and started tweeting my posts again, I started seeing that people did actually read my tweets, and wow, clicked on them to visit my blog.

And when promoting a book (and using a landing page to do it), campaign tracking will provide you with golden information on where to focus your efforts. Which social network results in more visits? Which social network clicks through the store most often? (Which is a topic for another day.)

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Photo by Mark Pritchard (that's his office - so organized!)

There’s something so inspiring in being organized. I look around a clean room and feel so much inspiration. It happens rarely, but when it does… I just feel better.

Of course, it’s all just in my head. Nothing creative really ever comes out of it. I just feel it.

That’s what I love about Evernote. Um… except it does help me create.

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