It is not uncommon for beginners to wonder how to measure blog success to enable them to monitor their progress and add any needed improvement. This appraisal is important if growth is at the center of your plan. One cannot keep working on a project without checking the progress of the project from time to time, and this is exactly the same with blogging. Your blog needs to be assessed from time to time.
It is not enough to put great time and energy into writing great blog posts and doing off-page SEO and keep hoping that things will turn out fine. Measuring blog success helps you to know how much progress you have made and the areas you need to improve on.
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Why Measure Blog Success?
There are expectations we hope to achieve with our blogs. These expectations should be clear as they are the parameters we have to measure while analyzing success.
Many blog or website owners hope to have an increased number of visitors, increased number of quality backlinks, increased number of email signups, increased number of posts being shared by visitors on social networking sites, increased stay of visitors on the site, and increased number of purchases through their blogs or website. These parameters form the basis used to measure blog success.
How to Measure Blog Success
The parameters to measure while evaluating your blog success can be broadly grouped into 4 groups. Some of these parameters may overlap with different groups.
1. Your Blog Reach:
This helps you to understand if your blog is getting to your target audience as projected. The parameters that provide this information include:
– The number of backlinks pointing to your blog. Quality backlinks always win over poor spammy backlinks. It is important to always go for the best backlinks to avoid potential penalties from search engines. Having thousands of spammy backlinks will only help in getting your blog easily penalized.
– The media firms linking to you. These are considered quality backlinks because they are coming from media houses.
– The amount of page views your blog attracts
– Unique visitors number
– Number of fans or followers you have on your blog’s social media accounts
2. User Engagement:
This helps you to identify how well your posts engage your blog visitors. Posts that do not engage will only cause dissatisfaction for your visitors and they may never return. The parameters that provide information on user engagement include:
– The bounce rate of your blog
– Pageviews per visitor
– Time spent on site
– Comments made on your posts
– Questions asked
3. Conversion:
Measuring your conversion rate helps you to determine how your posts have been driving your visitors to perform actions that will lead to a sale or purchase. The following parameters will help you to measure conversion:
– Email signups
– Number of registered users if applicable
– Quantity of ebook or tool downloads
– Click-through rate to blog posts
4. Social Media Shares:
Posts that are important and useful are shared by others from time to time on social networking sites. Knowing the number of shares helps to measure how your content is valued. These parameters can be used to take note of the social media shares:
– Number of people sharing your posts on Facebook
– Number of retweets received by your tweets on Twitter
– Number of interactions happening around your content on several other social media sites
