Summer 2015 & Season 4

Last year we had 35,372 summertime readers. This year? 35,158. And while that’s down slightly over last year, August of 2014 was massive thanks to the release of the WKRP in Cincinnati DVD box set and it’s still one of our most popular articles.

So why was Summer ’15 so great if we’re down ~1% year over year? Because we learned a lot about what it takes to get attention online.

1. Listicles work. We had 4,982 views on The Top Ten Ontario By-Laws You Had No Idea You Were Breaking — which is impressive since the WKRP post has 4,965 and it’s had a whole year on the Internet.
2. Undated articles work. The Definitive Guide to Streaming Music Services in Canada is by far the most popular article on G&Bdotcom at 14,383 views.
3. Old news works. The Sons of the Beatles are NOT Starting a Band has 5,924 views but didn’t really get attention for three months, and most of those views are courtesy of our Facebook page.

The “Subscribe to Geeks & Beats” post that has 1,748 is our generic landing page for the podcast episode. In Season 4 we’re tweeting the actual episode page, not the landing page, in an effort to get a better sense of what’s working in the social media headlines we use to promote the episode on Twitter and Facebook.

Keep up the good work with descriptive headlines!

What each of these articles has in common is headline SEO: search engine optimization. Google gives keywords included in headlines a greater weighting in search results, and the headlines also help the reader understand the content before they click.

Facebook’s 9,226 referrals in the last quarter is an anomaly and can be traced back to the Sons of the Beatles article. Twitter and Google Search are typically how people find us.

Please retweet only the G&B account tweets.

While Alan and I would love to have more followers, driving visitors to the @geeksandbeats account will give us a better sense of popularity. We currently have a modest 1,400 followers for a show that brings in about 3,800 listeners via Tines and 40,000 listeners via radio. Also, consider creating a free Hootsuite.com account for yourself and auto-scheduling tweets of your own articles. If you tag @geeksandbeats, I can retweet them and drive followers to you, too.

We haven’t been publishing your articles fast enough and I fear it’s dissuading you from writing more frequently. There have been instances where articles sit for days waiting for approval and that’s totally my fault. Vanessa Azzoli has been very good at proofreading and tweaking articles but she’s got a day job and I haven’t been picking up the slack. I will. I’m sorry for the past delays. Please keep writing!

1. More Interviews
2. Social Media Director

Interviews may be our best bet to boost ratings in Season 4. And we’d like you to be involved. There are two ways: one, chasing guests to be interviewed “live” on the show. And two, by interviewing them yourself and cutting up the interviews for clips in the podcast and full-length on the website (“for the whole interview go to G&Bdotcom”).

I’m wondering if we can boost our online street cred. by using @geeksandbeats for more than just promoting articles and the show. What about memes and other wacky geek and music related photos?

Let me know if either of these ideas appeal to you: