Metrics for Blog Success

I thought it would be useful to now take a look at blog metrics and suggest how to measure success.  As always there’s a wealth of information out there on different metrics you can use.  However, I have to confess this is one area that has left me cold.

Either I’ve reached my threshold of boredom or all these statistics are just too dry! I came across expressions like Raw Author Contribution, Holistic Audience Growth, “Citations” and “Ripple Index” – yawn!

So having started off looking at metrics I’ve now changed direction. It has rapidly become apparent to me that the first question needs to be what are you trying to achieve with your blog – what are your goals or objectives? Otherwise, I think you run into the great danger of being seduced into esoteric metrics and could waste a lot of precious time and energy.

 

What are the Goals for your Blog?

Goals and Objectives

The importance of measuring anything is that it needs to be balanced and meaningful and not absorb huge amounts of time. You do have a business to run after all!

 

KISS

I’m sticking to the KISS principle and have selected the following eight goals/objectives for my blog:

  1. Attract my target audience
  2. Get potential clients to spend time engaged with my content and brand
  3. Build an audience for my content
  4. Increase sales (also expand cross-sell and upsell)
  5. Support sales with appropriate content
  6. Improve my SEO efforts
  7. Get the attention of experts in my field
  8. Expand reach cost-effectively and maximise social media shares.

I could have chosen fewer but, to use a stock control analogy, if you only measure the out-of-stock items, you completely miss the low stocks. These then become the problem because you simply didn’t take action on them quickly enough. This convinced me that I needed to have a reasonably comprehensive list of objectives.

Rather than make this an extremely long blog post, tomorrow I’ll go through how I plan to measure each of these.  I hope these two posts will together help you identify what and how to measure your own blog. That is, of course, if you’re not already doing it.

If you have any additional goal suggestions, please comment below and let me know.

Kim

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