A case study of ASTD’s 2009 Blog launch. This presentation was originally given at the Project MUSE 2010 annual meeting.

1. Leveraging Content A case study of ASTD’s 2009 Blog Launch Anthony Allen Director, Digital Media American Society for Training and Development

2. About this Presentation Audience - Association and Society Publishers Date Relevancy - 2009 Tags - blog, content, analytics, web traffic This presentation was originally given at the Project MUSE 2010 annual meeting. Managed by Johns Hopkins University Press, Project MUSE is an online database of more than 200 journals from nonprofit publishers

3. ASTD trains trainers. We have been making trusted content for corporate trainers for over 60 years.

4. This is my Outlook. It’s open on my desktop all day, every day.

5. This is a closeup of my RSS feeds – relevant articles from across the Web, delivered right to my inbox. You can get them, too - just go to Google Alerts. Easy!

6. If I see an article in my inbox that my training customers would enjoy, I write a short summary about it on the ASTD Blog, and then link to the original article. This process takes about 5 minutes and I do it once a day.

7. Then, a bunch of things happen automatically: Twitterfeed grabs the blog post I wrote, shortens and tracks the URL link through Bit.ly, and then posts the title of the blog post to the ASTD Facebook and Twitter pages. There, people click on the blog post and get sent back to the ASTD Blog.

8. So I did this for a few months, and things were going well. So well, in fact, that I convinced several other people to do it with me. Both the number of postings to the blog and the number of blog readers grew steadily.

9. Each one of us posted to a specific blog category so there was no duplication

10. Some of the categories got their own Facebook and Twitter pages. There was enough of an audience to segment now.

11. During 2009, the ASTD blogging team posted more than 1000 times to the ASTD Blog.

12. What was the result?

13. A ton of brand exposure to NEW potential customers

14. went from zero to 10,000 monthly visitors! In 2009, the ASTD Blog….

15. New Returning New Ret. had 20% more NEW visitors than the main ASTD site! In 2009, the ASTD Blog….

16. In 2009, the ASTD Blog…. was the #1 source of web traffic, excluding search engines to the “About Us” page on the ASTD website! (Indicating that people who came to the ASTD blog were NEW visitors that did not previously know about ASTD.)

17. And in my opinion, most significantly…

18. In 2009, the ASTD Blog…. was seven times more likely to be found via a subject matter search term that indicated no prior knowledge of ASTD.

19. Red indicates a search term that specifically mentions ASTD or its products 2009 Top 25 web search terms that brought web visitors to ASTD websites. Main ASTD website New ASTD Blog 1 astd 1 talent management definition 2 astd.org 2 jobs 3 american society for training and development 3 astd blog 4 training and development 4 talent management 5 cplp 5 sales training 6 american society of training and development 6 state of the industry 7 www.astd.org 7 elearning 8 training 8 define talent management 9 astd conference 9 blog 10 cplp certification 10 cluture 11 training and development magazine 11 state of the industry report 12 astd certification 12 training 13 american society of training & development 13 mentoring 14 astd conference 2009 14 informal learning 15 astd conference 2010 15 cliques in the workplace 16 astd competency model 16 employee engagement 17 competency model 17 succession planning 18 astd.com 18 team building 19 astd 2010 19 emotional intelligence 20 t+d magazine 20 salary 21 astd home 21 communication and motivation 22 astd job bank 22 astd conference 2010 23 t&d magazine 23 definition of talent management 24 astd training 24 library 25 astd press 25 diversity

20. that means that the ASTD Blog was establishing itself as a trusted provider of online content about training.

21. All in all, great results, considering…

23. ASTD used a similar technique to grow the “ASTD National” discussion group on Linkedin.com to #126 out of over 500,000 groups. That’s pretty good!

24. Leveraging Content A case study of ASTD’s 2009 Blog Launch Anthony Allen Director, Digital Media American Society for Training and Development