Syndicate Your Content For Search Engine Domination How To Measure Your Blog’s Success
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So you’re a blogger and you love every minute of it. Each time you publish a new article, you’re eagerly sitting around, waiting for the first person to leave a comment. You’re looking for acknowledgment from other people and that’s exactly what you need to measure your success a a blogger.
So how do you define your blog’s success? Is it the amount of people that subscribe to your RSS feed? Is it the amount of raw traffic that comes through each day? Perhaps you measure your success by the amount of money you earn at the end of the month with your blog?
All of the above are eligible candidates for measuring success. But let’s try to break them down and analyze the different aspects that come with these criteria.
Daily amount of traffic.
Yes, load of traffic is important but it isn’t a great indicator how well you’re blog is doing. What it tells you is how good you’re SEO wise and if you’ve got a popular article that people keep stumbling or digging for example. Obviously you’re doing better than the blogs with less traffic if you’re looking to make some money online with your blog. Sure, Digg and Stumble Upon send you masses of traffic but it hardly converts into cash. The key here would be targeted traffic. If you get targeted traffic, you will start to see an increase in your blog earnings. The people that visit are looking exactly for what you’re providing them with. They will most likely click your ads, buy your ad space or a review.
Monthly earnings.
Boasting your monthly earnings does more than just ego boosting. It will attract more targeted traffic, people that are trying to make money online come to see what you’ve made and how exactly you did it. Success breeds success. If you’re a competitive spirit,you will most likely work hard to either meet or exceed your last months earnings. Since you’ve published them for the world to see, you’re putting more pressure on yourself to succeed. Just remember that you can’t and won’t be able to top last month every time. There’s only so much you can do to influence your income. A lot of it is dependent on external factors. Perhaps your advertisers have a low budget at the moment and they wont be able to afford you. But just because you’re making less then last month does not mean you’re blog’s success is decreasing. Like raw traffic, your monthly earning are not a great way to measure your long term success.
Amount of RSS subscribers.
In our opinion, this is one of the biggest and best ways to see how well you’re doing. Every single one of those people that have subscribed to your blog feel that you have something interesting to say and keep coming back for more. They’ve made a conscious decision when they signed up. They think you and your blog are worth their time and this tells you that you’re doing something right. Once you hook them, others will follow. Simply because people see that you got others interested, they will put their faith in the judgment others seemed to have made about you when they signed up for your feed.
In the end, it’s just your opinion that really counts.
There’s plenty of ways to see if you’re on the right track. The best way to use these tools is to combine their collective output and make and assumption on that data. Compare yourself to other blogs in your niche, see what they are doing differently than you and if this is helping them or not. Learn from the mistakes they make and improve on them. Just remember that in the end you alone can decide if you deem your blog a success or not, it all depends how high you’ve set the bar for yourself.
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To me the traffic and earnings is most important. Sadly neither are good at the moment.
I have never really thought about it. I guess all of them tell ya a measure of success, maybe average.. I do like getting emails showing that some other payment from a get paid to blog program has went into my Paypal!! That is pretty good and because my blogs rating has gone up ,the payments are getting bigger!
traffic? Earnings? RSS? PFfft!
I’m in it for the chicks. Blog Groupies.
Or was that music? Aw crap.
good advice for novice bloggers
I think any day that i bring in a descent amount of money feels like a success. I do feel like a big amount of traffic on any given day is good, but if I see that traffic produced no extra money than any other day, I do feel slightly disapointed.
Sorry, knight, you’re thinking of rock and roll
Blog Groupies? We love it!
We totally agree that RSS subscribers is a very good indication of a blogs success. Looking at the Google Stats, the traffic from StumbleUpon is good, but they bounce rate is high and the time on site is low. Sure, it makes our numbers look better, but is it quality traffic?
We are just starting out, but our numbers look good so far. But every morning, we check out the number of RSS subscribers and hope for more!
Subscribers for sure. Some good articles thorugh Stumble and Digg certainly help exposure which hopefully turns into some RSS conversions.
You can measure your success by you own goals.
You are looking to make money online… You will define your success by the money you earn.
You are just giving advice… You will probably define your success by the number of returning visitors and comments …
Your own goals tell you if you have a successful blog at the end
subscriber maybe the most important factors, in my opions . it means that who is interested in you blog, and want to share opions with you.
Subscribers it is, blogging tips article sure works pretty fine in stumble
For me, it will either be the subscribers or the Google Analytics stats because for some places, RSS Reader is not that popular yet.
Google Analytics and some other counters basically will tell you everything about your visitors. You will just need to take those who stayed for more than one minute into account and ignore those staying for less than 10 seconds.
I agree with Wayne that Google Analytics are one of the more important measures, particularly if you want to get in depth info on visitors. I use WP Stats for the overview and quick info and Google for details. As a blog ages, Analytics becomes even more important because it identifies how people are finding you in search.
I’d also agree that RSS usage is related a lot to the niche and doesn’t necessarily match traffic. For example, OpTempo, which is only 2 weeks old, has more subscribers than my software development blog which has about 10 times the traffic.
Subs/traffic
Not ads
i subscribed John Chow’s RSS recently just for the contest prize and hopefully to help him to beat shoemoney, not because of its great content. after that i’m going to unsubscribe.
Thanks for the list… I just wrote a quick article like that before I noticed this one, and I also have a full post of goals for your business coming up next week.
There are so many different ways to measure your blogs’ success, especially how the Internet tracks and stats. Thanks again, Scott
I measure my blogs success by the time of day I shower.
If it’s 5:00pm and I’m still wearing my GI-Joe-footed PJ’s, I know it’s been a great day.
That is why I keep saying it is so important to set goals. Whether it is 15 more subcribers or 10% earnings increase a goal allows you to form a plan. You can then lay out tangible steps towards achieving those goals. When you surpass goals you have set yourself, then you now for sure you are succeeding!
for me just traffica can make money lots not comment
http://uponsel.blogspot.com
Success is when you’re put in the Bloggers’ Hall Of Fame for your multitude of achievements (for good and evil) and money may not necessary be the main reason for it.
I just started a blog, so this article was very informative. Good job!
I think it does really matter “why” you started the blog also. Good points in this article.
great article, cow!
So basically what you are saying is that use Alexa Ranking (traffic), Google’s PR (quality) and FeedBurner statistics (RSS). Then measure it up with the cash you got compared to the money you got from your day job to see if your blog is successful? Well when you look at it that way, it seems like you and the top 1 percentile have taken away all the money.
I haven’t monetized yet so my main factor is my RSS subscriber number. I also like to see traffic growth, see my posts get votes on sphinn, inbound links, ratings on technorati etc.
does the rss scribers really as a measure?
because i have website with increased monthly unique visitor and also adsense earning, but none rss scribers.
fyi, my visitor mainly came from serp, > 90%
confused..