Successful Blogging: 7 Ways To Measure The Success Of Your Blog

Posted on December 15, 2007
Filed Under Blogging Tips |

Success While writing about Technorati in my last post - How To Use Technorati To Promote Your Blog, I started thinking about some of the other things you could do with Technorati. One of these things is ranking your blog against other blogs. That in turn got me thinking about what that ranking means. Some might argue it’s a measure of the popularity of your blog and therefore your success as a blogger. Others might say it’s just a meaningless number.

So for those of you who like to be judged or given a score, I have put together a list of 7 methods for measuring the success of your blog. Most of what follow are purely objective measures, but there is room in a couple for some subjectivity. Let me know what you think - I am curious to find out how others perceive success when it comes to blogging…

1. Website Traffic

How much traffic your blog receives is an absolute figure and one that can be measured fairly easily. Free tools such as StatCounter and Google Analytics are quick and easy to setup and will give you a good breakdown of how much traffic your blog receives as well as more detailed analysis.

Some may consider 10 visitors per day successful. For others, the threshold might be 100 or 1,000 or even more. It’s a personal thing and will depend on a blog’s niche and the blogger’s aspirations.

But what if we look deeper? What if we looked at measures like the number of page loads per visit or visit length. Maybe these measures would give us more insight into what our visitors think of our blog, and ultimately whether our blog is successfu.

2. Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa Traffic Rank provides a number (ranking) which you can use to compare your website’s popularity against that of other websites. The ranking is based on a combination of the number of visitors to your site and the number of pages viewed during each visit. The lower your traffic rank is, the more popular website is.

Using the traffic rank figures, you can measure your blog’s popularity over time and also against other blogs. Success might be cracking the top 20,000 or just continual improvement over time.

One of the shortcomings of Alexa Traffic Rank is that the statistics it’s based on are only gathered from those web users who are using the Alexa Toolbar on their browsers. Some would argue this will not be a truly representative sample with which to work, and therefore question the value of the Alexa Traffic Rank.

3. Google PageRank

Google PageRank provides a measure of the importance of your website. It’s determined by calculating the number of other websites linking to pages on your website, then adjusting for the importance of each of the sites linking to you.

PagePank can be used as a measure of success because it measures the number of other website authors who consider the content of your website important enough to link to. Surely every blogger should aspire to writing good quality, linkable content.

However, there has been some controversy surrounding PageRank of late. Because of the importance of PageRank in the ranking of Google’s search results, some website owners try to manipulate PageRank by buying links from other website owners. Selling links which pass PageRank forms a central part of some bloggers’ monetization strategy.

But Google argues that search results should be a fair representation of the information available and should not manipulated by those with enough money to buy PageRank. In an effort to put a stop to these activities, Google has begun penalizing websites which engage in these activities including many blogs. There has been much debate on this recently and I’m not going to rehash it here.

4. Technorati

As I mentioned at the outset, Technorati provides another popularity measure for your blog. Technorati publishes Authority and Rank figures to indicate the importance of each blog. Authority is the number of blogs which have linked to yours in the past 6 months and Rank is the relative position of your blog’s authority measured against all blogs listed on Technorati. A Rank of 1 is awarded to the blog with the most Authority.

5. RSS Subscribers

Most blogs these days offer an rss feed. Sites like Feedburner allow you to manage your rss feed and track the number of subscribers you have. Using these figures you can measure your blog against others in your niche, against your own historic subscriber numbers or against a goal you’ve set for yourself (eg. 100 subscribers by the end of the year…).

6. Comments

Some of the benefits of blogs include their ability to establish a dialog among groups of people and their usefulness in building communities around particular topics. Therefore a good measure of the success of your blog may be the amount of discussion it generates by way of comments on and trackbacks to your articles.

You may also want to consider the nature and content of the comments you receive. This too will be a good indication of how well you are doing. But remember - not all negative comments are bad…

7. Money

For some bloggers, the bottom line will be cold hard cash. How much does your blog earn? Your goal might be $10 or $100 per month. It might be $1,000 per month or even more. Success might be earning enough from blogging to give up your day job.

Because most blog monetization strategies are based around traffic and or popularity, many of the success indicators already discussed in this article will play a part. Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank and Technorati Rank all play a part when selling text links and publishing sponsored posts. The volume of traffic your blog receives will determine the price you can charge for advertising.

But Success Is A Personal Thing…

Most of the measures listed above involve measures of popularity either in an absolute sense or when compared against other bloggers. And I would argue that a major motivation behind blogging is to make yourself heard, whether that be to put forward your views, generate discussion, make money or a combination of some or all of these.

But others may be happy to give voice to their opinions regardless of the size of their audience - there is nothing wrong with that. I would be interested to read other’s views on success. How do you measure the success of your blog?

Technorati Tags: alexa, Blogging Tips, google, successful blogging, technorati




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Comments

7 Responses to “Successful Blogging: 7 Ways To Measure The Success Of Your Blog”

  1. Chris on December 15th, 2007 8:44 am

    PR, Alexa & even traffic (or rather page impressions) are pretty devalued these days - I think RSS subscribers is probably the best metric, but I like to see a lot of good comments - I’ve been fortunate in having a few good discussions unfold in my comment section which is always gratifying.

    Is your truncated RSS feed a deliberate choice BTW, or did you not know it was doing it? Pet peeve of mine ;-)

  2. Brett on December 15th, 2007 4:10 pm

    Thanks for the heads-up Chris. I noticed the truncation a couple of weeks ago and tried to fix it, but didn’t get anywhere.

    I think I have finally managed to fix it.

  3. betshopboy on December 16th, 2007 3:00 am

    Being able to make a positive influence and make a difference in my readers’ life, that would be the Ultimate success!

    However, that is easier said than done, and not all that easily measured.

    As long as my content can generate lively discussions and exchange of ideas among the small community I’ve built, I would consider that a success.

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