My first-grade teacher, Sister Christine, always said, “The best way to ensure something is working is to set goals, ask questions about what you want to achieve, and then measure your performance.” Whether it was with a ruler, a calculator, or simple checklists, the good Sister emphasized that there are many easy tools to help track success. And, Sister Christine could be quite motivating with the ruler to encourage and measure our learning success, if you catch my drift!
These measurement lessons focus on assessing your blog’s performance. Inspired by the good Sister, I developed a learning and measurement plan for social media and blogging while collaborating with several award-winning ad agencies. This approach was a valuable tool to help our clients grasp their goals, the questions they needed to ask to support those goals, and the metrics they should track to learn, understand, and improve performance.
It is key for bloggers and marketers to be able to measure the right activity to help judge its performance and make content and platform changes help reach the right audience with the right message.
How To Plan For And Measure Your Blog’s Success
1. Increase Awareness With Your Blog. Use your blog to amplify the awareness of your product, service or event. To help you understand if your blog is attaining this goal, you need to ask the question “Is my blog post reaching my target audience?” You can help to answer this question by paying attention to these key blogging metrics:
- Page views
- RSS feeds and email sign-ups
- Search rankings
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- CPM
- Fans/followers/readers
- Media links
2. Keep Your Customers Engaged With Your Brand. Use your blog to keep customers informed, engaged and in a ready to act state. Answering the question, “Is my blog post interesting and relevant?” You can measure the interest and relevancy level by paying attention to these metrics:
- Time on site
- Page views
- Blog, discussion, document views
- Content rating
- Comments
- Likes & comments
- Content clicks
- Questions asked
3. Drive Conversion With Your Blog. When it comes to making money for your business, a blog can help drive sales or sales-related activity. It can drive registration or any other action that moves customers closer to a sale. So, a question that you need to be asking yourself if, “Is my blog driving conversion-related activity?” Important activity to measure is:
- Click-through to the web page
- Downloads
- Registrations
4. Get Your Content Shared As Thought Leadership. Getting to people to share and advocate your content is the last key goal. You could classify this sharing activity as engagement, however, it’s important to focus on creating content that gets socially shared. You should ask yourself the question’ “Is my content valued enough to be shared by the reader?” You can answer this questions with supporting activity that measures:
- Shares/ Retweets
- Referrals
- Repeat visits
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
Do you have another way to measure your blog performance? If so, please share below. Or contact me directly at MarketingThink.com and on Twitter @GerryMoran.
If you found this advice helpful, then you might enjoy these other ideas to help you measure your social media performance:
- How to do 9 back of the envelope calculations to see if your Twitter and Facebook are working
- 5 ways to measure and optimize your blog traffic
- 10 questions to ask about your twitter reach
- How to measure your LinkedIn success
Now back to my first-grade teacher, Sister Christine, who had two different ways to use a measuring tool; first using her ruler to determine if there was any measurable progress and then using that same ruler to bang on my knuckles when I wasn’t writing fast enough! Now, back to my next blog post … “Must …. Write …. Faster … Or …. Sister …. Christine … Will … Use … Her …. Ruler … For …. Some …. Something …. Other … Than …. Measuring”. Ouch!