Starting a blog: How do you Measure Success?
7 08 2007
I’ve been asked before how you know when your blog is successful. That question means different things to different people.
Here are my thoughts on how you can measure the success of your blog:
Others appreciate your posts. For me, the fact that someone found my blog and asked to think that means that my blog is successful.
Ability to share expertise in life / business experiences. Writing about something that you believe in and sticking with it may be enough for some. But to give that knowledge over to someone else is another level of success.
It makes you money. Making money online is a great thing, and making money writing about what you love in a blog can be incredibly satisfying. Unfortunately, the majority of blogs don’t make much money.
Pronet does a good job detailing out a study by the University of Texas and Chikita in showing that the top 50,000 blogs generate $500 million (according to 2006 data).
Popularity. Blogging doesn’t usually make you a celebrity, but it has before in certain cases. The Queen of Sky, Ellen Simonetti was thrown into the spotlight after her blog got her fired from Delta Airlines.
Stats. You could also measure popularity using several different metrics:
- How many hits you have. This number can come from the stats that are part of the blogging platform you are using, or a third party such as Sitemeter.
- Your blog authority rank in Technorati:
View blog authority - Number of subscribers you have on your Feedburner feed:
- Your Alexa ranking (note: widget won’t show if your rank is not among the top 100,000):
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Blogging can be fun. I’ve had to split off subareas of my blog recently because of their popularity.
@HMTKSteve: that’s certainly a good strategy. What do you find the most popular subareas to be?
I tend to measure the success of my blog by the number of hits I get in a particular month. I know that if i’m getting over 100k hits then I’m doing well.
@Pete: that’s a good measure. I find that visitors (more specifically, unique visitors) are a better metric than hits though.
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My most recently popular subarea has to have been pokemon. I had to launch a new blog (pokefarm.com) just to host the huge pile of content that was generated. It was getting so bad that 75% of all of my new content was related to Pokemon and some of my long time readers were complaining.
@Metagg: thanks again for the pingback! Glad you’re sticking with me!
@HMTKSteve: that’s pretty funny. How did you decide to preserve your traffic (in other words, let’s say you had very popular posts on the initial blog - how did you make the transition to pokefarm.com for them)?
Using GoStats is a great way to learn the most about your traffic. The extended reports can tell you things you’ve never thought of with ordinary statistics.
@Richard: ok, but in what way would you say that GoStats is better than Sitemeter or WP.com’s built-in stats?
Brian gives readers a glimpse into the world of blogging. And bloggers the opportunity to discuss the trials and tribulations of having a meaningful blog.
@Carl: that’s a good way of putting it!