Is Your Blogging Effective?
You have been blogging for months, how do you measure if your effort is successful? What topics that you write are best received? Use the web analytics from your hosting company or use Google Analytics to give you these answers.
Purpose: Before you start measuring success, you need to have a purpose for your blog. Blogs that address a particular audience about a particular topic will build a larger readership. Readers return if they like what they read. If you write about a wide variety of subjects, then you won’t have a chance to develop many repeat visitors.
Feedback: Visitors to your blog give you feedback on what interests them even if they don’t leave comments. When you write something interesting you will see an increase in the number of visitors, the number of comments and even the nature of the comments. If you listen and watch, you can use this to deliver more of the content that your audience likes.
- Numbers of visitors: If nobody visits your blog then your blog is not effective. If you write a blog posting 3 times a week, which topics or postings created the highest number of visitors? Figure out what you did right and do more of it.
- Comments: Which postings yielded the highest number of comments and discussion? Was it the subject? Your writing style? Possibly the questions you asked?
- Length of Stay: How long did your average visitor stay reading your blog? Were they there for 30 seconds or for 5 minutes?
- Entry Pages: What postings attract visitors over time? These are ones that visitors find on the search engines long after you have written them. These are your reader’s favorites.
- Location: Where are your readers from? Google Analytics allows you to see not only the country and state, but the city too. This is important if your blog is for a local business.