One of the simplest and most effective ways is by offering archive search directly on your site, and the best way to do that is by installing the Lijit Widget. Lijit has long been an advocate for publishers and their readers and using the free Lijit widget is a great way to improve reader engagement.

The first step in reader engagement is discovery. Readers need to find your content in the first place, whether that is by search, from an RSS reader, or increasingly from a social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Local search is helpful to readers because it allows them dig deeper into content you may have written previously on a similar or related topic.

If you’re an expert in an area often visitors will come for a timely post of the moment, but you can highlight your expertise by making it easy to get at your great older content via search. Given the deluge of content available online, local search is a great way to recirculate that great post from two months back that you spent hours on!

Of course, local search is just the beginning. Lijit supports searching for your other content that’s not even hosted on your site, like YouTube videos, Twitter, and Delicious, just to name a few. If you are part of a blog network, formal or social, you can include your network’s content in search results as well, helping to expand your audience’s exposure to your network’s content.

Lijit also offers a statistics dashboard of its own, including some PostRank magic to showcase your recent top posts. One of the coolest features of the Lijit statistics is the tracking of search queries, including queries that ended up with zero search results. This is magical data since it tells you what your audience thinks you should/would write about, and what they would be interested to read. This is a great source of inspiration for future posts.  There’s a more complete description of what the widget can do on the Lijit Widget Features Page.

So, here is a great experiment to try for PostRank Analytics users:

1. Baseline your engagement, get a feel for what “normal” is with PostRank Analytics’ Engagement Overview
2. Sign up for Lijit and install the Widget on your site
3. Measure the impact of the Lijit widget on engagement and pageviews after a month in PostRank Analytics.

Clearly your mileage will vary, but by using your site’s engagement as a primary measure for feedback you can experiment with tools like Lijit, as well as writing styles and topics to see what will keep that audience engagement moving up.

Special guest Carol Leaman, CEO of PostRank, joins Byron White, founder of ideaLaunch, for the presentation, offering a review of killer tools to measure social engagement of your content and the value of content in the social media sphere. Learn how content marketing powers social media, inbound marketing and all marketing today.

Webinar attendees will also receive the 101 Content Marketing Tips e-book free!

Register now!

2009 was a big year for publishers. Audience engagement with content has once again grown by 30% percent, even as the balance of engagement has changed dramatically. On-site engagement has dropped over 50%, while off-site engagement, now over 80% of most publishers’ total engagement, has skyrocketed!

PostRank gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, like Twitter, Digg, and Delicious over the course of 2009. That data represents the hard work of thousands of bloggers, and is the backbone of our Analytics, Data Services, and content filtering services.

With more competition than ever for audience’s attention, we wanted to award those bloggers whose hard work and great content most engaged and grew their audiences over the past year.

Which brings us to… The Top Blogs of 2009!

We crunched all of the 2 billion metrics from the past year to rank the blogs by their engagement within each topic populated by our users. In total, we selected nearly 500 topics (491 to be precise) containing 15725 total blogs, and built a detailed profile for the performance of each site – their overall rank, their engagement profile over the entire year, and their top posts as determined by their audience.

Awards methodology

Each topic contains a ranked list of blogs, along with each blog’s engagement profile and top posts for all of 2009. However, we didn’t feel that handing out just one award per topic (Most Engagement) told the whole story, so we are highlighting three notable achievements per topic:

• Most Engagement
• Most Influential
• Biggest Movers & Shakers

To determine the winners of Most Engagement, we identified each post that the audience interacted with in 2009 for each site, calculated the total engagement points per post, and then determined the total amount of engagement for each site over the course of the year. From there, it was simply a matter of ranking the blogs by who got the most points overall in each topic.

We’ve awarded bragging rights to each topic’s Most Influential bloggers as well. We determined who they are by calculating who averaged the most engagement per post over the course of the year. Would consistent efforts at engaging the audience win the day, or would a handful of posts gone viral be enough to claim the crown? Find out!

We also wanted to recognized those who worked their butts off this year, and have the audience and influence growth to show for it. Those bloggers who showed the biggest engagement growth over the course of the year have been awarded our Biggest Movers & Shakers award. Will these folks will win the Most Engagement award next year?

We couldn’t have done it without you!

Now, we know this extravaganza is totally v1.0. And a really big example of crowdsourcing. So no, it’s not perfect. There will be some duplication and inconsistency, and I’m sure we’ll hear cries of, “Hey, I’m not included in _____ topic!” (Good thing that’s very easy to rectify!)

It’s inevitable, but if we waited til it was perfect, it’d never happen. And we’re all about making things happen. Plus, realistically, with a few thousand people involved, what is the definition of “perfect”, anyway?

All that said, we’re really jazzed about the results, and hope you’ll find it interesting and useful. We’re also incredibly grateful to our user community for being such a big part of building it. With your continued help, it’s only going to get better for 2010 and beyond!

Bragging rights!

All of our winners can claim badges on their blog pages to announce their triumph, and everyone included in the topics list can grab the badge that displays their rank. Each blogger’s page will also conveniently display their Top 10 posts for 2009, which easily facilitates those “Best Of…” posts. (Readers love getting shortcuts to the good stuff.)

Will your blog be on top in 2010?

Check out the Top Blogs of 2009 and see how your blog stacks up, or just find great new content to read on all the topics you’re interested in!

And, of course, if your blog is not included within the topics, make sure to add it to be included next year!

Make sure you’re included!

How Will the Rankings Work?

PostRank tracks reader engagement with content by measuring what happens with articles and stories. We monitor 20 social sites across the web where readers create, critique, chat, collect and click. For each engagement event a weighting factor is applied based on the level of engagement that event suggests.

Individual story engagement is then rolled up and a total engagement score for the site is used for the ranking. It’s a truly remarkable signal that indicates how engaging and influential a publisher is. (Learn more: About PostRank, About Engagement.)

Help Us Curate the Lists

To make sure our topics reflect the best publishers and content out there, we want your help. Every day we work hard to make sure we track the best quality and most engaging publishers on the web. But you, the actual members of these communities, can make sure we haven’t let something slip through the cracks.

Anyone can add new sites to our system. And any registered user can add sites to specific topics. Please visit your topics of interest and add the ones you feel should be there. Could be your own, or someone of whose writing you’re a fan. Let your communities know, too, so they can make sure they’re represented.

You can browse all available topics or search by topic name in the search field on the postrank.com homepage.

Adding a new site to our system is as easy as entering it into the search field on postrank.com. (Please note, however, that to be added to our system, a site does need to have a valid RSS feed.) To add an existing site/feed to a topic, you’ll need to create an account. Fortunately, that’s easy as pie.

Then you can use the search field to find a specific topic in the drop-down results — just start typing. Or select it from the All Topics page.

To Add a Site to a Topic

1. On the right sidebar of the topic page, click the Manage button.
2. On the Topic Management page, type or enter the new site’s URL into the Add Feed field. If it’s in our system, it will appear in the drop-down list.
3. If the feed isn’t in our system yet, just add it in the search field on the homepage, and it should appear in a minute or two.
4. Click the green plus sign button to the right of the site’s listing to add it to the topic’s feed list.
5. Click the Save Changes button at the top of the screen to save the update.

Voila! You’re done. To see where the new site is in the topic’s rankings, click the Feeds link in the right sidebar to see the topic’s full list of sites. If you have any trouble, let us know.

Find Out How You’re Doing Now

If you’re already in our system you might want to see how you’re doing in detail. Check out PostRank Analytics! Get a snapshot view of the last 30 days of your site’s engagement with the PostRank Analytics Tour.

And for 2010, keep working hard on creating great content, discovering where your audience is, seeing how they engage with that content, and growing your community and influence to make yours a Top Blog!

Resources

• PostRank Logo location: http://blog.postrank.com/images/PostRank_logo.png
• Top Blogs 2009 badge location: http://blog.postrank.com/images/topblogs_2009.png
• PostRank.com homepage: http://postrank.com
• PostRank All topics page: http://postrank.com/all_topics
• PostRank Analytics Tour: http://analytics.postrank.com/tour
• About PostRank: http://postrank.com/postrank
• About Engagement: http://analytics.postrank.com/docs/engagement

We want to make it easy for publishers to learn more about their audiences and how those audiences interact with publishers’ content. PostRank Analytics is an excellent tool for achieving that goal. But we’ve made it even easier to get started.

Now you can get a great overview of websites’ social engagement with one click!

Take the PostRank Analytics Tour. Enter any website address and see the social engagement metrics for that site over the last 30 days.

• On-site and off-site engagement distribution of audience content interactions
• Engagement points graph that shows overall engagement trends for the site’s content
• Engagement events and points by social hub – clicks, tweets, diggs, etc.

All of this clearly and simply laid out for your perusal. While you’re there, perhaps you’d even like to do a little competitive reconnaissance…

Of course, that’s just a taste of what PostRank Analytics offers. The Tour’s Features section will tell you more about:

• Flexible engagement overviews
• Tracking multiple sites
• Trends
• Integrated Real-Time Google Analytics
• Changing the sites you’re tracking
• Monthly or annual subscriptions.

Still new to discovering and tracking engagement? Learn more on the About Engagement page.

PostRank WordPress Plugin

So what does the Tour’s engagement info have to do with WordPress? We’ve combined the two!

With the PostRank WordPress Plugin, publishers have already been able to see PostRank scores and an in-line, at-a-glance view of each post’s social engagement.

Now WordPress users can enrich their admin panel with the same dashboard as on the Analytics Tour page. Social engagement metrics for each post AND a 30-day overview of their site’s engagement!

Additionally, we’ve upgraded the Top Posts Widget that’s part of the Plugin’s functionality. A simplified appearance and improved search function. This will help readers find a site’s best content on specific topics of interest even more easily.

All of this functionality for WordPress users isn’t quite as awesome as all the good stuff you’ll be able to discover, track, and grow when you sign up for PostRank Analytics… But we think it’s pretty cool. Get the PostRank WordPress Plugin and check it out!

Many thanks to our friends, families, and fans for their support. (And to partners for putting up with 30 days of living with guys who looked like the Village People or 70s porn stars…)

And the winner of one of Melle’s very fine custom-made sockmonkeys is… Tim Jackson! Seems we sparked a bit of competition at Tech Capital, and Tim’s sneaky one dollar oneupmanship won the day. Congratulations!

And for a taste of what it’s looked like around the office lately… (Though today they all look years younger. Heh.)

If you love PostRank as much as we do (or, y’know, want a break from whatever you’re doing for a few seconds), head over The Crunchies’ website, scroll down to Best International Startup, type in PostRank, and click nominate. That’s all there is to it! We really appreciate the support, and we’ll be sure to include you in our teary acceptance speech… (Voting is open until midnight PST on Friday, December 4th.)

Public exposure and recognition mean a lot to little startups like ours. And when you come to work in jeans and t-shirts most of the time, a chance to get all dolled up and hang out with fancy people is exciting stuff. Thank you for your votes, and thanks for being part of our community and helping us build great stuff.

Update: Since the voting started, a company called Postini has been added to the nominations as well. So be careful when you vote, because if you’re not careful, the field will resolve to “PostiniRank”.

In fact, the main finding of the study is that Social Computing is already mainstream! Not surprisingly, the trends they discover fall directly in line with data we see at PostRank (Measuring Engagement of Social Web): 30% year over year growth in user engagement for the past 3 years, and a shift towards user curation and strengthening of the weak ties.

Key trends observed by the JRC-IPTS researches:

• 41% of all EU Internet users, and 64% of those aged under 24, were engaged in Social Computing activities
• 38% of people aged 15-25 in Europe had profiles on Social Computing sites
• 32% of European Internet users had crated a Social Networking Site profile
• 30% of internet users make use of Social Computing content created by others, e.g. they read blogs or wiki sites, watch videos on YouTube or use social networking sites
• 10% (included in above 30%) provide feedback or comments
• 3% are content producers, e.g. they create blogs or Wikipedia articles, upload user-generated video onto YouTube or photos onto Flickr

Societal change and Social Computing

A good sign that Social Computing is mainstream is also the fact that older audiences (aged 55 and above – 25% of internet population in Europe) are joining in on the fun.

Collaborative learning models, alternative learning channels (social computing has been shown to have negative impact on TV viewing and reading of newspapers, by substituting online content instead), ability to connect learners to experts and researches to practitioners in field under study are all contributing to profound positive change on our society:

Overall, we expect that Social Computing will foster social change in the next 10-20 years. At the societal level, there could be more efficient, interconnected and transparent markets, more participatory processes of governance and new forms of economic and social innovation.

Read the full report here, and also take a look at the recent trends we identified at PostRank: Measuring Engagement of Social Web.

We’ve had a number of folks request the ability to track Analytics for more than one site, so now all Analytics users can add and analyze their social web metrics for up to five sites.

Users who are currently tracking one site can add up to four more, and users who have more than one account can amalgamate their site tracking. (I’ll be getting in touch with them to let them know exactly how to accomplish that.)

What will you be discovering, tracking, and engaging with next?

Change the sites you’re tracking

Analytics users can now change which websites they’re tracking in their account (in addition to adding up to a maximum of five). You can also track separate Twitter accounts and Google Analytics for each of your sites.

Change your email address

On the Account Details page, you can now change the email address associated with your account. Sometimes the little things are the handiest.

Change your account subscription type

Now you can change from a monthly subscription to an annual one, or from an annual subscription to a monthly one.

How that works is, if you have a monthly subscription and switch to annual, once your current billing month ends, then you will be billed for a year (and get an extra free month!)

If you have an annual subscription and switch to monthly, once your current billing year ends, then you will be billed for a month, and then subsequently billed monthly after that.

As always, we want to hear from you about how we can make PostRank Analytics even more useful and valuable. Send us your questions, feedback, or issues any time.

It’s great to work with such a well-known publisher and see PostRank engagement data used to bolster offline traditional media analysis in such an important way. We think it’s a great example of how traditional media is looking forward and seeing how the social web can be valuable in performing research, expanding reach, and keeping relevant to their audiences.

From the case study, a bit more about Atlantic Wire’s goals and intentions with The Atlantic 50 project:

With the Atlantic 50, The Atlantic Wire intends to be the go-to op-ed page by aggregating the latest opinions from a defined set of opinion makers, found across the web. There is so much opinion out there, in blogs and on mainstream media sites like newspapers’ and magazines’ online properties. The Atlantic 50 is intended to appeal to an educated, media literate audience who read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and similar publications, but simply don’t have time for thorough reading, including the op-ed page, every day.

The Atlantic Wire team has framed current political commentary in two ways, as a result. Readers can browse by topic and see what’s currently “hot” among pundits and their audiences. These are stories on the topics currently getting the most engagement from online information consumers like themselves. From healthcare to the economy, it’s to find out what’s being talked about, and what different folks’ take on the issues are.

Additionally, the opinion makers of The Atlantic 50 are ranked by the amount of engagement their content is currently receiving. The list is updated regularly, so where they fall in the rankings in a result of how their audiences are reading, organizing, sharing, and responding to their commentary, rather than being based on editorial judgment or assessment of political leanings.

Keep your eye on The Atlantic Wire and, whether you lean left, right, or just love great online news and opinion coverage, let us know what you think of The Atlantic 50.