If you have been blogging for a while, how do you measure if your efforts are successful? Which topics that you write on your blog are read the most? You can use Web Analytics such as Google Analytics, Statcounter, Awstats and other analytics software to give you these answers.

Purpose

Before you can start measuring how successful your blogging is, you need to have a purpose for your blog.  Blogs that address a particular subject and audience are the ones with the largest readership. Interested readers can return if they like what they read.  If you usually write about a wide variety of subjects, then you won’t have a chance to develop many repeat visitors.

Feedback

If what you write is interesting and informative, your visitors will give you feedback on what interests them even if they don’t leave comments.  You will see an increase in the number of visitors and comments if you write something interesting.  You can listen and watch and then use this to deliver more of the content that your audience likes.

You can use your analytic stats to measure the following:

1. Number of unique and returning visitors: If nobody visits your blog then your blog is not effective.  If write blog postings 3 times a week, which of those postings created yields the highest number of visitors? Research and review what you did and create more of the same blog posts.
2. Comments: Which of your blog postings yielded the highest number of discussions and comments? Was it the subject of your blog post? Maybe your writing style or the questions that you have asked your audience?
3. Length of stay: How long does your average visitor stay on your blog? Where they on your blog for 30 seconds or for a couple of minutes?
4. Entry pages: What blog postings attracts the most visitors over time? These are the blog postings that your visitors found on the search engines long after you have written them.  These are your blog reader’s favourites.
5. Location: Where are you blog readers coming from? Google Analytics allows you to view not only the country and state, but the city tool.  This is important if your blog is for local businesses.

There are other tools that you can use to measure how successful your blogging is but the first step to look at is your blog’s analytics.  This can show you important information on where your blog needs improvement.

Category: Blogging
Tags: effective blogging, google analytics, measure success

About the author: Anton Koekemoer

I am a professional blogger, developer, web technology consultant and a marketing strategist with an emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies. I am the founder of SocialPress, a business social networking service aimed at South African entrepreneurs to take their business to the next level via networking an...read more about Anton Koekemoer