August 12, 2009

How Do you Know if your Blog is Successful?



One very important aspect of any Internet endeavor - regardless of whether it is an email promotion, or website, advertising campaign, putting products to sell online, or a blog, is to be able to measure the success of the venture. After all, without proper measurement, one cannot determine if the venture has been successful or not and to decide if there is a need to invest more effort and resources.

Using the correct measurement is also critical because there are a couple of measures which worked in the past, but as Internet technology has evolved over the past few years, some of these measures are becoming less significant.

Here are three ways you can use to measure the success of your blog.

Comments
Blogs are all about creating conversations! Comments measure the quality of the post in terms of the ability to create conversation. The number of comments you get for every post that you make on your blog is the first good measure of success of your blog. However, in doing this, it is valuable to not that the number of comments is tagged with how controversial your blog topic is. Normally,blog posts that touch on very popular and controversial topics should garner more comments.

That said, it would be unfair to measure the number of comments day by day. Measurement in terms of blog comments should be done probably best by the month. If your comments have been increasing in number, you are doing a good job in writing and promoting your blog!

Readers of Your Feed
People subscribe to your feed only if they find the contents of your blog interesting and when they see the value in receiving the latest updates to your blog. Using popular feed management tools like Feedburner, the blogger is able to track how many subscriptions there are to your feed.

Again feed readership will fluctuate, and subscription to your feed does not necessarily mean that people are reading your feed, so it is important to use this measure alongside other measures.

Unique Visitors
One of the better ways to measure the success of a blog is the number of unique visitors coming in to your blog. In this, I emphasize unique, because if you are a fan of your own blog, editing and posting on your blog all day and night, it would be easy to contribute significantly to your own page views, especially on days you spent tweaking your blog template.

In using unique visitors, it is also valuable to note that there will be traffic spikes - like at times when your blog post gets Digged, or someone notices your post and email the link to your post to his or her mailing list of a million people.

In conclusion, measuring the success of any Internet venture is critical. While there are multitudes of ways in which one can measure success, it is important to use the ones that work well for the current practices in Internet trends.

Once again, hope this helped and good luck with your blogging!

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