Blogging, as we all well know, is a great way of connecting with an audience, but it’s really important to measure how well your blog performs, if only to justify the time you spend on it and demonstrate its marketing value.
There are a number of blog measurement methods that are worth applying:
• Analyse the amount of traffic to your website
The amount of blog posts you publish will naturally increase traffic to your website, and you can monitor this through Google Analytics or similar web analytics tools. I use Google Analytics to measure the volume of visits to my blog pages. I blog three times a week and make sure I’m consistent, posting Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays – the statistics for traffic to my website show significant spikes on those days. And the total traffic has grown more than 5-fold in just over 9 months and website enquiries and email sign-ups are up. Shows its working for me!
• Find out if your audience is growing
Again, through Google Analytics you can measure the amount of visitors to your site and the amount of unique visitors. I also track the number of subscribers to my blog. Converting a visitor into a subscriber is so, so valuable – it gives you permission to present your content to them.
• Identify which blog posts have performed best
You can check this through Google Analytics and it’s always worth trying to identify trends. Does a certain style or type (e.g. top tips, 3 part series) of post attract a greater readership than others? Or a certain topic area? In my case, I look at this and also whether longer posts are read more than the shorter ‘Some Really Useful Stuff’ or posts with video content.
• Monitor the comments to your blog posts
Blogs are meant to stimulate a dialogue between you and your audience, so keep an eye on which ones attract the most engagement and comments. If it’s clear that certain topics resonate more than others then you can perhaps tailor your posts to more fully explore those topics – which will help add further value for your blog readers. You can also ‘ask the audience’! – ask your blog readers what topics they want to hear more about.
• Check if your readers are sharing your articles with others
So how many people read one of your articles and then retweet it on Twitter or share on LinkedIn or ‘Like’ on Facebook? And just like monitoring reader comments, this is a good way of measuring the extent to which specific content is valued and shared.
You could also take a more altruistic view and measure success through the success of your readers. If one of my readers contacted me to say that their latest email marketing campaign delivered their best ever ROI as a result of reading my blog post and following my advice, then I’d be pretty chuffed with that!
How do you measure the success of your blog? If you have any useful suggestions, I’d love to hear from you.