How Successful is Your Blog?

Image by flazingo_photos

How do you measure the success of your blog? Whilst there’s arguably no greater success than running a site you love, there are a lucky few who manage to turn this success into big bucks.

If you do want to turn your blog into a money-maker, tracking key stats such as social following and page views can be a great way to prove to brands that they’d be lucky to work with you.

And, aside from the money, keeping track of how many people are visiting your blog and how much they’re engaging with it is an essential part of learning how to improve.

Here are the stats to keep an eye on.

Page Views and Visits

If you want to see who’s visiting your site and where they’re going, a site analytics service is essential. Google Analytics is one of the most comprehensive free programs and provides you with information showing how many people have visited your site, which pages visitors clicked on and where most people entered and exited.

The Google Analytics software can be a little confusing at first – it’s routinely used by professional SEO companies, as it offers unparalleled insights – so luckily for you we have a beginners guide to Google Analytics!

However, there are a huge range of other paid and free programs to choose from, some of which may be more suitable if you only require basic insights. For example, the plugin WordPress Power Stats allows you to track visitors without having to write code or modify your site.

Social Following and Engagement

To brands, your social following is a visual representation of how popular you blog is. So the higher the number, the more likely they are to want to work with you.

The number of followers you have is clear for everyone to see – however, there are a number of other insightful statistics to consider.

One of the most important metrics to track is the level of engagement, which is basically how often others interact with you by liking, favouriting, commenting or re-sharing (often known as amplification) your content. After all, there’s no point in having thousands of followers if none of them are looking at what you’re posting!

This post from Hootsuite details which actions can be classed as engagement or amplification across a variety of social platforms.

Another important metric to track is social referral traffic, which shows how many people are coming to your blog via your social networks. You can read more about the social analytics function on Google Analytics here.

Other Sites and Publications

Being featured on other sites or in publications is essentially a form of recommendation, as well as great publicity (as long as the mention is positive!). Whether you’ve been interviewed, written a guest post, mentioned in an article or recommended, make sure you keep a record of it – particularly if the site or publication is highly regarded. This type of coverage is a great way to show brands that you’re highly respected in your niche.

Subscribers

Subscribers are arguably the lifeblood of a blog and a great indication that people are actually reading your posts! Plus, a high number of subscribers is a great statistic to be able to tell brands.

Most blogging platforms, such as Blogger and WordPress, will provide a plugin which will allow readers to subscribe to your blog.

Arguably, the success of your blog can be measured by how much it’s making you happy. Even if you aren’t making any money, if you love blogging, you can count yourself as a successful blogger.

However, if you do decide that it would be nice to earn some money too, tracking your blog’s success can be a great way to convince brands that they’d be lucky to work with you. Gathering these statistics can also help you to see how your blog is working and in what ways it could be improved.

Do you have any more ideas about how to track your blogs success? Let us know in the comments.