This Q & A will be less Q & A than the last one and more like an attraction marketing fireside chat, but it’s still good stuff.

Your thumbnail on the grid and how it affects your page views during the week of yeah write

For our purposes, when I say page view, I’m referring only to clicks through the yeah write grid to your blog. I don’t have a method for tracking tweets, retweets, Facebook posts or links to your blog in comment streams even if those clicks are directly related to your participation in yeah write. But, we only need a sample of clicks, not the whole shebang, so using the data from the Inlinkz app is perfectly okay.

We’re gonna compare yeah write #45 to yeah write #44, mainly because I mentioned in the yeah write #45 post that thumbnails with faces historically received the most clicks, so a few of you switched from thumbnails of inanimate objects to faces. Thanks for helping out with my completely unscientific data collection.

Yeah write #44

50 blogs

1,075 views

756 visitors

1,789 clicks on the grid

an average of 36 clicks for each submission

Yeah write #45

46 blogs

1,148 views

890 visitors

1,878 clicks on the grid

an average of 41 clicks for each each submission

There were fewer bloggers in yeah write #45 than in yeah write #44, but more visitors and clicks. Did the decision by some of you to use a face in your thumbnail, giving us more faces on the grid, positively affect the number of visitors, even with fewer participants? Probably! The grid looked more personal, less commercial, and new visitors hung around. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

Now, speaking individually, there are a few influencing factors on page views for each blogger on the grid:

• length of time on the grid (the blogger who links up right as yeah write opens with all else being equal may end up with more views than the blogger who links up right as yeah write closes)
• perceived popularity of the individual blogger
• whether or not new visitors to yeah write are targeting particular bloggers during the vote by social media invitation
• how much time is left in the voting period

People like us

That last one is probably most influenced by the thumbnail image. When pressed for time or when simply overwhelmed by the number of blogs to be read before voting, people tend to zero in on what looks familiar and comforting and that would be a person’s face, especially if the face is similar to their own.

Pet faces seem to get as many clicks as human faces here on yeah write. Babies’ faces and non-PLU get even fewer clicks on the grid than do inanimate objects such as logos. What’s a PLU? It’s a sociology term that stands for people like us. As it relates to readers and visitors of yeah write, well, um, black people—a definitively non-PLU—may want to stick to pets and logos as their avatars. If you’ve ever wondered why I never use my actual photo in a general population blog event in which click-throughs are important, now you know.

Ahem. So.

Yeah write #44

with a mean average of 36 clicks for each linked blog

of the thumbnails that attracted more than 36 clicks: 65% were of adult human PLU faces

of the thumbnails that attracted fewer than 36 clicks: 62% were of something or somebody other than adult human PLU faces

Yeah write #45

with a mean average of 41 clicks for each linked blog

of the thumbnails that attracted more than 41 clicks: 65% were of adult human PLU faces

of the thumbnails that attracted fewer than 41 clicks: 62% were of something or somebody other than adult human PLU faces

Adult human PLU faces on the grid for the win.

To be sure, yeah write loves it some good storytelling. However, attraction marketing is where it’s at these days, and if we don’t attract the readers we want to our spaces, our good storytelling will go unread. Lonely. Wondering where it went wrong. Why didn’t he call when he said he would?

Redesigning your avatar may help.

With special surprises and, I hope, lots more faces on the grid, yeah write #46 opens Tuesday.