I recently had the chance to play on a really fun website that was shared by my foodie blogger friend, Jess. The website is a free tool for bloggers and entrepreneurs around the world. It’s called Peek and it gives you the ability to submit your website to the tool. A random internet user is selected to spend 5 minutes on their website giving their feedback and thoughts on it. They comment on things like how easy it is to navigate, what they thought the site was about and things they liked (or disliked) about it.
It’s a 5 minute quick user test and you are able to submit your website three times a month. This means you can get insights from 3 different users each month and improve your site accordingly. You can click here to see what one of the users had to say about Tech Girl.
There are a host of blogger benefits of reader insights and they are so incredibly important. Asking for feedback is great but it isn’t the only way to generate reader insights. You can determine reading patterns from your Google Analytics but you can also utilise data that is interpreted from surveys and questionnaires. I spend a lot of my time searching for poll and survey results to determine generalised behaviours and attribute them to my readers.
That’s why I found Pondering Panda rather interesting. I had the opportunity to have lunch with the Pondering Panda team and they walked me through the company and what they do. Pondering Panda is a digital research company…. but with a difference. They collect mobile data from a few platforms (Mxit anyone?) including WeChat. You can add Pondering Panda on WeChat using their ID: ponderingpanda. They conduct fun surveys and questions about anything and everything from internet surfing behaviour to more specific brand focused questions. Sometimes, if you answer the questions you are rewarded with airtime or some sort of other user benefit BUT, the advantage, for me, is the access to “free” data.
Many big brands pay Pondering Panda to conduct research for them on the platforms so you may end up answering some questions about soap, however, many of the surveys actually allow you to see the results once they are made available. So, for someone like me trying to get a better understanding reader insights, by adding Pondering Panda and answering a few questions I can see what the general feedback is and use that to my advantage.
Perfect example: one of the Pondering Panda questionnaires was recently about the online world. It took me 2 minutes to contribute my answers and then I had access to the results. Check this out:
So from there we can see that not many people click on banner adverts. I could use this information to determine how to monetise my blog in a way that benefits advertisers AND my readers. I’d suggest playing on Pondering Panda to get idea of the the types of people answering questions and determine if their responses could be generalised to your audience. Best part? All it costs is a few minutes of your time signing up and answering a few questions.
What tools do you use when blogging to determine reader insights?
