How To Measure Your Blog’s Success  

Hey bloggers, yesterday I was with some friends and one of them started to ask me about my blog. I explained him what I do in my blog, giving to him a little idea about this big world called blogosphere. He surprised very much about what I do here , asking me who read my blog and how can I measure the success of it. That is a very good question, there are many factors that help you to measure your blog’s success giving you the hint if it’s good or bad.

Your achievements in social networks



This post attempts to provide how you can measure your blog’s success taking advantage of its statistics combined with its reader’s interaction.

How many people is reading your content?



When you start blogging, you should know how many people are reading your content, being this good or bad. Using webmaster analyzers you can know this kind of statistics, knowing the exactly amount of people who visit your site daily. A good way to increase this number is using social media networks, those normally gives tons of traffic.


Amount of subscribers



This is may be the most obvious factor. Many people think that you can measure a blog’s success just looking its subscriber’s counter but really it’s more than that. It’s truth that you can get a idea about how successful a blog is just seeing the amount of subscribers, but you can assure nothing. I going to give you a example, what about a blog with 3 years of age and only 1000 subscribers ? if you don’t know the blog, seeing 1000 readers you can think that it’s awesome but may be it’s not really. But if you take a look on Jonh Cow for example, when his blog has like 5 months of age, it had ~700 subscribers and now it has ~1400 in less than one year.



Moral: The number of subscribers is important, but you need to consider the time in which you obtained your subscribers.
Subscriber’s chart of Mr. Javo dot Com
In this graph you can see how my daily subscribers has increased weekly up to this date. I think it’s good what do you think?

Comments per post



The next important factor is the number of comments on your blog. The number of comments per post gives you a idea about the quality of your blog, if it’s good it will create a atmosphere of discussion between you and your visitors. Answering your reader’s questions and paying attention to their critiques you will improve you relation with them, creating in your blog a nice place to stay. Actually I’m getting an average of 8 comments per post which it’s not a lot but it’s a good number to start isn’t it?

Your achievements in social networks



All the achievements you obtain in the social networks it’s very related to your blog’s success. Using this kind of networks ( digg, stumbleupon, blogcatalog …. ) you will start to make contact with other bloggers, you will start to attract their attention and they will start to visit your blog over and over again looking for new content… Doing a good role in all those social networks, you will promote your blog, make friends and gain readers all at the same time, definitively exploding your traffic.





Backlinks



The backlinks or links which point back to your blog are a good indicative of how popular is your blog. While more backlinks you have more traffic you will get, and traffic on the blogosphere is synonymous of success :grin: . You can get backlinks by commenting on blogs with dofollow, discussing in communities or forums, exchanging links with other bloggers for blogrolling etc etc… You can learn more about how to get backlinks in this post.

Mr. Javo dot Com Backlinks @ 03/05/2008 ~ Note: I have +150 reactions on technorati, that statistic is bad



To finish, you may know that first that you can measure a success, you need to set goals. Don’t public them if you don’t want, but you need to set goals weekly or monthly. This way you will always have a goal to reach, applying effort and dedication every time to reach them.



You should check all this aspects and ask you questions like: how many people are reading my blog? I’m being amiable with them? I’m participating sufficiently in social communities?…answering all those kind of questions you can determinate if you are getting success with your blog or not, and if you think that you need to focus in a determinate task, go ahead, set your priorities and don’t worry about that, everybody neglects something in the life.