How To Measure Blog Success

Measuring the success of a blog may seem like it is a complex conundrum, but it is quite simple. All you need to do is look at a few easy to match up statistics from your website.

To measure the success of your blog, take a look at your viewership. Knowing how many people visit your site every month and which pages they visit the most is the most telling of the success of your blog. Furthermore, find out how many people actually subscribe to your blog. If you have subscribers, then you know that people are interested in your posts and they feel that they are in fact learning something from you. Last and most importantly, make sure your blog is over a year old with over 60-100 blogs on your website.

I have heard so many people say the first year of blogging you are only writing to help others without any money. What many people will not tell you is that everybody is going through the tumbleweed phase with their first website, their first year. No one visits your blog, and four months into blogging, you feel like blogging is not for you. Maybe your blogs are poorly written, there is too much competition and who am I kidding, I cannot do it anyway. You cannot be more incorrect, and if you have awesome content, it will be noticed all you have to do is work and wait.

What to do before you measure your blog…

Do not consider the success or failure of your blog before your blog is over a year old and it has sufficient quality content. This is a huge ranking factor because Google needs time to crawl your website to find out where it belongs in rankings. If your website has poor quality content, it will rank lower in search results. All websites go through a testing period that I call the tumbleweed period (because only you and tumbleweeds are rolling around in a Texan bar, while no one else bothers to come for a visit). In this period Google will look at your website for all number of issues. Some are, how often you post a blog, are you consistent, the quality of your blogs and the functionality of your website.

So here it is in list form:

How often you post a blog
How often you post a blog should be as much as possible, because the more content you put online, about your topic, the more you signal to Google that you know your stuff. Think about it if you have written 100,000 words on any topic you will definitely be fluent in what you are writing about, moreover as per the Google guidelines you do not need to have an education on the subject you write about for your content to rank. If you have years of experience, then you will by default be an expert, and Google recognises this, thank goodness!
Are you consistent?
Staying consistent means that you publish an article on the same date and time every single week! You are at the end of the day dealing with a machine and machines are like your alarms they do not care if you had a bad night, did not sleep at all, or even if you were violently sick. The machine wants punctual because then it will come to crawl your post regularly.
The quality of your blogs
Are your blogs half-hearted answers that are only 600 words long? Or do you write an informative 1200-3000 thousand word post that fully answers the search query? Pro bloggers are signing a “no fluff” petition (just kidding 😉 ), but try to avoid fluff in your blogs, be informative. You may think it is not possible now, but one day you will write these big long informative posts that will get views! As it is with everything, the more you blog, the better you will get at it, and you will be able to write longer posts with ease.
The functionality of your website
When I started building my site on WordPress, I was overwhelmed with ideas, and honestly, I spent too much precious time playing around with different themes. I literally stop myself from changing my current theme just to try something new. Please pick a theme that easy to use and has a simple, clear layout. I use Astra, and they have so many functionalities for free. I did start with the free version; furthermore, they have so many new templates you can choose from. Using Astra is like having multiple themes in one theme. Even though you may lose yourself in the bling of all the amazing themes choose a simple layout for your first site. It will be so handy when you later decide to monetise your site with ads, and all your readers will like easy navigation for great user experience.

Viewership

You should measure your viewers in many different ways. The first and most obvious is how many people actually come to your site every month. Then look at which pages your readers go to most. The most visited pages should have links to other pages on your site that are relevant to the post topic, but be careful not to put too many links to another post on your website. Google says that if a post has too many links to pages on the same website, it will negatively hurt the ranking of the site. You can check to see which pages they visit most and how long they spend on the page.

Social Media Sharing

If your readers are sharing your content, this is a sign that your post was either, so relevant, or helpful that the viewer wanted to share it with someone. Google will also think that your post must be the good stuff because someone is sharing it online.

WordPress has made it incredibly easy to add sharing buttons to your site, so make sure to add them to your site. Make them accessible, visible and make sure that your social media accounts have relevant content. You do not want people to find an irrelevant collection of mumbo jumbo on your Pinterest account.

Subscribers

I usually visit countless websites every day looking for some information, and I almost never subscribe to the newsletter because I do not want hundreds of newsletters in my inbox. Many people have the same attitude towards subscriptions, and I do not blame them. Of course, there are the odd website that has either an amazing offer for free or some extremely helpful content that is not a repeat of ten other blog posts I have recently read if I think that I can learn something from someone’s newsletter then and only then do I subscribe.

My behaviour is typical to most people looking online for information, so if someone subscribes to your newsletter they want to get some secret sauce recipe, and they feel that they can learn something new from you. So all in all if you get even ten new followers a month you are doing great.

Final thoughts

Come on guys and gals you can do this! Please write to me if you feel stuck in the mud about your tumbleweed experience, and I will give you a word of encouragement. I know what it is like and I will be happy to help you or give you any advice I can.

Keep blogging and don’t give up just yet the world awaits.