How do you measure blog success?
April 17, 2008 · Print This Article
What sort of things do you look at to measure the ’success’ of your blog, whether as a whole site or on a post by post process. I guess it might depend on why you are blogging as to what your actual definition of success might be.
Here’s a few basic ways that I thought of:
- Page views
- Number of comments
- Saves to del.icio.us etc and other social bookmarking sites like Digg etc
- Links to you from other blog
- Number of RSS subscribers
I suppose even these measures aren’t definite. For example, a few comments having a quality discussion are probably more valuable than hundreds saying ‘Great post!’ or something equally rubbish.
But of course there are other things to, which might tie in more to your reason for blogging. For example, campaign blogs which have a particular cause in mind, or blog that promote a new way of doing things. You might not get many comments, but if you manage to change the way people are doing things, then you have been successful. I guess the only problem is that you won’t know about it!
The great thing about blogging, though, is that if what you are doing is useful to people, or if it is something that folk find interesting, then people will link to you, or comment, or bookmark your stuff. It’s almost inevitable.
How do you measure your blog’s success?
Dave - interesting question.
For me at the moment, it is a great way of having a voice, saying something, collecting my ideas.
I hope that, in future, people might actually *read* it, though critical mass is a long way away.
So, my measure of success at the moment is that it helps me let of creative steam - i.e. it is an internal measure, not seen in terms of other people…
[...] suggest some other stats they’ve probably not considered and why they’re useful, along the lines of Dave Briggs’s measures of blog success. Finally, I suggest ways to improve the site. The top tip will be to take control of the site [...]
There’s some nice sugggestions in the web analytics guide from nixon mcinnes, including the Conversational Index:
“the conversational index is the simplest way of doing this - just divide the number of posts by the number of comments and trackbacks”.
dan
Quality of comments and of course views/stats. I’m fortunate to get a good range of knowledgeable people commenting on my blog and enhancing my knowledge of the books I’m writing about.
How about completely off-topic comments? Such as: “Someone needs your Linux-knowhow help on Palimpsest, Dave!”
http://palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showthread.php?p=89779#post89779