John Battelle writes:

Blogs are wonderful for reading a stream of consciousness, the on-going dialog of the author(s) and the audience (though I have to say reading comments is far more of a pain that it should be.) One of the major strengths of blogs is their conversational immediacy, when one becomes a reader, and knows the flow and grammar of the site, the ongoing postings become far more accessible.

BUT…

A brief dip into nearly every blogger’s referral logs shows that a very large percentage of readers - nearly 40 percent in some cases - come directly from search - someone who put “steve ballmer throws chair” into Google, for example, and lands here.

Why is this a problem? Imagine: 40% of you site’s traffic coming straight from organic search results. First time users that simply stumble upon your web presence - the Internet equivalent of Consumer X happening by your store on the way back from dinner. To extend this already stretched analogy, imagine that Consumer X walks into your store, walks directly to aisle 5, reads the label on a can of tuna, and walks straight out again. They didn’t even see the huge display of high-margin wine on the end-cap.

What’s the solution? This is what Battelle has to say:

Now imagine instead, that when that person comes from search, they are greeted with a box that pops up and is informed by the search referral information that we all carry with us as we click away from Google or other search engines. That box surfaces a smart search based on the referral - perhaps it shows the reader other posts I’ve written about Microsoft, or Google and Microsoft, or senior executives in the Internet industry. Perhaps it shows me the top five *other* posts folks read who *also read* that Steve Ballmer Throws A Chair post. You know, the kind of merchandising a good site like Amazon does all day long (from what I can tell, search referral boxes were pioneered by Cnet, for credit where credit is due).

Aha - Relevance! Instead of giving the consumer the tiny tidbit they asked about, you go ahead and show them that plus other products you’d guess they’d be interested in. Any retail floor salesperson worth their salt knows to do this within their first month of work. So why is the Internet different? It comes down to the organization of information. Once more, I refer to Mr. Battelle:

Why can’t I have, easily, a list of all my posts sorted by how many links each has, or by a matrix of links crossed with authority of those links? How about the number of comments? Or the number of pageviews each post has received? With all of these signals, plus tags, I can start to really build useful navigation elements for all my readers, past, present, and future.

But it’s way too hard to get all this information and harder still to know how to use it. I know it’s out there, in bits and pieces, but it strikes me that no one company is really motivated to address this problem in a way that benefits bloggers. I have high hopes for Feedburner, now that it bought BlogBeat, and perhaps I’m missing some dead obvious widgets that do all this and more for any particular site

Consider that the traditional marketing industry has had decades to evolve into the robust, complex system it is today. What with Nielsen, Arbitron, and Polk, traditional media can target and cross-sell to the Nth degree. Such metrics are still in the infant stage for the Internet. Still, there are some pretty amazing things possible and we here at Intermark are always exploring.