A blog is a regularly updated online personal journal or diary. It is a platform to express yourself to the world, share your thoughts and your passion. I love blog, because it gives me the opportunity of reaching hundreds or even thousands of people daily. Also, a blog is your own website that you are going to update on an ongoing basis.
If you are running a blog for business instead of about personal interests like pet, cooking or fashion, you need to think to develop a measurement strategy. Before you just simply grab a web analytics tool and start your web analysis, you should think of the following questions first:
• How many posts do I write per month?
• How many words in each post on an average?
• Is anybody out there reading my blog?
• Am I just talking to myself, or am I having a conversation?
• Are my audiences talking about me or my business?
• What is the benefit of my blogging effort?
To answer these questions that are unique to blogs, you need to understand the following measurements.
Contribution
When people analyze their sites, most of them are simply looking at the number of Visitors and Page Views. In fact, people should be looking at themselves first. People should ask themselves how much they contribute to their blog before they want success.
Raw author contributions is measured by tow metrics:
• # of posts per months
• # Of words per post
Although these two metrics are not used to measure the quality of your blog, they show the frequency and consistency of your contribution.
Audiences
To answer the question – “Is anybody reading my blog” – you should understand how people read blogs. People normally use some popular web analytics tool like Google Analytics to measure the onsite audience growth – sessions and users.
However, one thing about blog is that your audiences can use RSS feeds to read your contents. This means that they don’t have to visit your site to read your posts. In this case, you have to measure this audience with a tool like Feedburner.
Conversation
To answer the question – “ am I having a conversation?” – you need to understand conversation rate. This can help you identify whether you are actually publishing content that makes your audience active.
Conversation Rate indicates that how many comments per post received from your audience in a certain period. The more comments you get, the higher conversation rate. That is what you want. You want your audiences to communicate with your, contribute content and create a real social experience.
Backlinks
After you get a good conversation rate, you need to find out whether your audiences are talking about you or your business.
If other people are talking about what you are writing, they may link back to you. These links are called backlinks, which is one of the biggest backbones of SEO. To check your backlinks, you need backlink checker. Here is a list of some free online backlink checker tools.
• Analyze backlinks
• BacklinkWatch
• Open Site Explorer
• Link Diagnosis
• W3tool’s Backlink Checker
Monetization
People can make money from their blogs. They can use AdSencse or other services to display ads on their blogs. Or they can join an affiliate program to promote products or services that are in their niche. All of these activities can generate money to webmasters. You calculate the money you earn from these activities.
In summery
Although there are many metrics out there that are used to measure the success of your blog, they may not be appropriate for your goals or you may be overwhelmed. You’d better start with these basic measurements I, and then you can gradually explore your own portfolio of measurements as your blog become more and more successful.
