"Desire Lines" and Blogging

Desire lines are those well worn paths that get us to where we really want to go - in sheer defiance of the official paved route.

Blogs gives small businesses an easy way to rapidly adapt web content according your visitors' desire lines: what they actually want, rather than what we expect them to do.

I attended a presentation by Eileen Brown, Microsoft's Technology Evangelist, where she applied the idea of desire lines to blogging.

One common sense way to discover your visitors' "desire lines" is to review your web statistics and analytics. Your analytics can help you to learn about your audience:

• Which of your blog postings or web pages get the most hits from the search engines?
• Which of your recommended links do visitors follow most commonly?
• Which postings or pages hardly ever get viewed?
• What path do users most typically take through your site?
• And by extension, what do they really want?

Accommodating the your visitors "desire lines" in your blog is easily done and will provide satisfaction for those readers who want to go a different way, rather than being led:

• creating the types of content visitors most commonly read
• providing links to other credible sites
• tagging your content to faciliate discovery of related material
• comments from your readers with links to other interesting sites
  

On the one hand, blogging can be a powerful business tool to push key marketing messages to your readers.

But it can also act as a valuable instrument to learn more about those clients who want deviate off your planned route. Your visitors don't always want to follow the path (read: navigation) that we lay out for them, and they don't act the way we expect.

Learn more:

Peter Meholz (who invented the word "blog") explains Desire Lines