It’s hard to know if your blog is successful if you don’t track and measure its results and failures. It’s like trying to win a race while wearing a blindfold. You won’t be able to take any real steps forward because you won’t be able to see what’s in front of you.
In your blogging strategy, everything needs to be clear. You need to know what’s working and what isn’t. You need to be aware of what can come in the future. You need to be knowledgeable about what happened in the past. You need to know where you’re wasting money. You need to know the areas where you need to spend more money.
A caveat: Blogging isn’t necessarily easy. Success is rarely born from a random accident. The authoritative blogs you see—the ones that are pulling in hundreds of thousands of visitors consistently—have a system in place that tells them what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. They aren’t making choices erratically; most of the decisions they make have reasons behind them. These “reasons” are really goals that they are trying to meet. These goals could really be anything, but let’s condense them into three main objectives:
- Increased Traffic and Visitors
- Increased Sales and Revenue
- Increased Brand Awareness
That is where most business blogs should aim. But you won’t reach these goals without installing a real system to track what you’re doing right. This is why you need to use metrics.
Blog visitors, pageviews, and search engine rankings
After you add a new post to your blog, you want to know a few important things:
- How many visitors your new post receives
- How many repeat visitors you get on that post
- The length of time that they stay on that particular post or page
Over time, you’ll see that certain types of posts yield different results—some will work better than others. You’ll be able to see what’s popular with your community, and that will enable you to b provide more optimized content that is custom-tailored for their wants and needs.
But that’s not all. You need to track how many new visitors come to your blog. In particular…
- The exact percentage of unique visitors that come to your blog
- Find out where these new visitors came from. Did someone link to your site? Or is this from the search engines?
- The amount of pages they view when they visit your blog. This will tell you how interested they are
- Take note of any posts that will cause you to climb in the search engines. And find out why you climbed
- What inbound links did you receive? And from where?
You also want to take note if there is any sudden spike of traffic to your blog. If a sudden spike occurs, it could be from a number of things—you received a backlink from a high-traffic site, your content is being shared via social media, or your SEO efforts are finally paying off.
Prospects, call-to-actions, and conversions
Your business blog needs to have a sales focus. At the end of the day, a blog is another avenue for revenue, and if you don’t realize that, you’ve misconstrued the purpose for having a business blog. But it’s a slippery slope. You can’t force-feed your product or service to your blog visitors or they will promptly reject what you have to offer. You need subtlety. A deft, graceful hand is effective. And you need to measure that effectiveness. A simple way to do this is through having a track-able link in every call-to-action (CTA).
- Know how many visitors clicked on your CTA link
- Know how many visitors bounced from your sales pages/web copy/ order checkout page
- Know how many visitors were ultimately integrated into your sales cycle
- Know what posts have yielded the most purchases, signups, etc.
When you have split-tested different CTAs and post headlines, and when you know the types of posts that deliver the most sales, it becomes much easier to make your blog into a revenue-generating machine. Once you know what works, you can replicate and multiply it.
Community engagement, social media, and brand authority
The best blogs are pillar authorities in their niche. You need to have an active community that will comment on your posts, share your content, and make other more aware of your brand.
- Take note of what posts yield the most blog comments
- What content is getting shared the most? Who is sharing your content?
- What posts receive the most social media interest (likes, retweets, votes etc.)
Where to go from here
You need to measure as much as possible. The more data you accumulate, the easier it is to know what direction to take. The metrics that you track will relate to your marketing goals. When you meet these goals, your blog will reach the next level.
Very useful information indeed. I have struggled to even make my personal blog popular, and I’m just trying to show people my personality! Again though, great help, I’m sure it will come in handy.
Blogging can become difficult when your starting out, you may also find it difficult to find your ” tone” when your starting off. There are endless resources, marketplaces and crowd source platforms offering a vast selection of social media marketing professionals able to convey the appropriate tone to your blog. Sometimes it takes a while to connect to your audience and allow them to experience your authentic personality. There are a few ways you can lighten this process:
1. Tone Control – Try reading a few blogs that may offer useful information and study their ” tone”. You may want to mimic or develop your tone based on what you discover generates traffic. Scaling your tone back may be just the ticket to pulling in an audience with less expertise in your niche.
2. Automation Discrimination – Be very selective of what platforms you use to get your content out there. There are over 100 new programs for every 1 authentic program. There are strategic ways to saturate social media without overdoing it. I would suggest concentrating
Thanks for the info , its useful stuff. I have been thinking about starting a gaming blog but I haven’t decided for sure. This info should help me when it comes to deciding about the business side of things.
It is indeed useful stuff, I agree strongly! I think you should totally go for it. Although this blog is for florists, there are a lot of tips that apply to all types of blogs!
Perfect post! I think there is a true lack of information circulating about what actually yields as measurable attributes to create success with a blog. There are a variety of start up blogs and companies whom think the traffic will just pour in if they post in a forum or comment but it’s work. There is an aspect of success that is generated based on the previous actions set fourth by the owner. There are a variety of social media experts with an unlimited supply of resources that monitor the traffic, keywords and influence saturation based on the given niche for the business but there are new company owners whom don’t have access to the same tools. Bravo on a great article outlining ways new start ups seeking a way to gauge their brand online are able to do so with minimal complication.
Great post, I agree. There is certainly information not being noticed about what makes a great blog successful. If only everyone was aware, and I’m thank that this site is making me more aware every time I visit it!
To be honest, up to this point, I’ve been using Google Analytics as a simple ego booster. The more unique visitors I got to my site, the better I felt. Thus, I find some of the points here to be really helpful. Using a traffic spike to learn what part of my content is the more engaging one or to check who linked where with the purpose of emulating that result, are things that didn’t pass my mind, until now.
I also need to pay more attention at my inside metrics, like where people are commenting most or posts they like and share a lot. And by doing this I can steer my content towards better results.
I am a metrics junkie – always looking to find out what type of traffic my blog is getting, and disappointed when my expectations aren’t met.Many aren’t even aware of metrics so this post is doing a real service to bloggers everywhere.