Measuring A Blog’s Success

No one indicator can be reliably used for measuring a blog’s level of success; several different factors have an impact on how much success it can be considered to have achieved. Criteria for measuring the success of a blog also varies depending upon the goals of its author.

One important measure of success for a blog is how many repeat visitors it receives. If many of the same people return to it daily or weekly, the blog’s content is probably of interest to them, updated regularly, and considered to be of good quality. It is less costly in time and money to retain repeat visitors than to promote the blog to new readers. If statistics show many people reaching the blog without a referring URL, they are probably typing it into their web browser’s address bar or accessing it from their favorites/bookmarks. A blog can still be considered to be a success if most of its readers come from links on other web sites, but it will be more dependent upon the other sites and may suffer if they disappear or change ownership. Positive comments to blog message postings, and voluntarily links from other web sites, can also be seen as indications of a blog’s success in offering interesting, high-quality content.

Some bloggers desire to earn advertising revenue or promote a product/service they are selling, while others want to express an important opinion or do both. Measuring success is somewhat different for each of these goals, but receiving a substantial amount of “traffic” or “hits” is important to all of them; all want their message to reach as large an audience as possible. While bloggers most interested in expressing an opinion may be satisfied if enough people read their blog posts, bloggers who want to earn advertising and/or sales revenue will be displeased with a large number of readers who are unresponsive to their promotional efforts. This may be a problem of attracting the wrong type of readers, or because the blog is improperly designed to encourage purchases or clicks on advertisements. Measuring how much success a blog has attained also depends upon how long it has existed; if it was started a couple weeks ago and already has several readers who frequently visit it, this is a greater indication of its successfulness than if it were several months or years old.

Overall, measuring a blog’s level of success involves determining the number of voluntarily-placed links to it, regular/repeat visitors, positive comments regarding it, total number of readers, and the advertising or sales revenue it generates.