Finding the right KPIs to measure blog success
Have you ever had an idea worth sharing with the world? If the answer to this question is “yes’, then you almost certainly own a blog or personal website. Blogs, and personal websites for that matter, have recently become very useful to performance, especially as personal marketing and promotion tools. If used and managed accordingly, they can become tools for personal and professional development.
The interesting thing about blogs is that they are perfect start-up tools for measuring one’s on-line performance. Whether you want to measure # Frequency of blog posts, # Visitors or % Natural traffic from keyword search, web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, make your blogging job so easy.
First of all, blogging, like on-line socializing, is about building relationships. In this respect, # Social shares per blog, is a good indicator to show whether your site is gaining popularity or not. Visibility is important, and social networks are perfect facilitators for virtual recognition. While building relationships, it is also important to cultivate them.
KPIs such as # Comments per blog post or % New blog commentators, may be useful tools in assessing visitor engagement in topic related conversations. On the other hand, KPIs like #Blog email subscribers, #RSS blog subscribers and % Subscription renewal rate are the perfect trackers of how good your blog content is resonating with the audience.
Strong relationships are a solid foundation for blog success. However, a post is intended to reach as many visitors as possible. Optimizing keywords and relating them to core topics, is one of the instruments that make blogs noticeable on the web. Search engines use keywords to return results, which is why using them adequately makes the difference in many readers’ choices. The topic of search engine optimization (SEO) might be unfamiliar at first, but, in time, higher % Searches by engine may become the key indicator for your blog’s success.
Once readers find your blog or website, you want to make sure that the content you have provided for them adds value to their knowledge. That is why quality content is an essential prerequisite of online recognition.
Gauging content quality
An indicator for the value of a blog’s content is # Content downloads, which indicates if the materials available for download on the site are relevant for the users. Building a good reputation is highly dependent on the quality of your posting and article writing. Establishing a positive presence among peers stimulates teaming up with other blogs for link sharing. Many other blogs, or even large sites, will be glad to publish excellent content to increase their # Returning visitors.
As important as quality content is, value to content is also added trough good visual representation. A relevant theme, pictures and videos related to the blog content makes it more attractive for readers to spend time linking blog editorial content to its visual representations. The # Time spent per post is an important indicator of how useful and entertaining content really is. The higher the time spent per blog post is, the lower the bounce rate.
% Bounce rate is expressed through the percentage of visitors who enter the blog and leave it immediately, rather than spending more time viewing it. When analyzing the KPIs of your blog, or website, make sure that the bounce rate has low values, as high values may be linked to poor administration.
As the final step in measuring the performance of your blog is its evaluation, examining the previously suggested indicators helps you assess blog development. The main areas to consider are % Pages yielding traffic and % Content engagement index. $ Revenue per visit and % Conversion rate are important indicators for the amount of financial rewards obtained from blogging activities.
Although, at first, you might look at your blog from an artistic, immaterial point of view, good performance may attract advertisements and advertisements bring revenue. Getting to the point to producing revenue from blogging may be a hard, strenuous path to follow, but, once you get there, you might have discovered the right KPIs to measure blog success.
In conclusion, you might start a blog to put your ideas out there on the World Wide Web, but it is the sharing part that you really have to work for in the end. While it may look easy at first, learning what, where and how to share is a commitment to integrity and outstanding performance. So, I ask you this: Are you the blogger whose ideas are worth sharing with the world?
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